Heroic Interview: The Happiness Hypothesis with Jonathan Haidt

You're listening to the Happiness Hypothesis an Optimal Living interview with Jonathan Haidt and Bryan Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading positive psychology researchers and academic professors about his great book the Happiness Hypothesis. It's one of my favorite positive psychology books and favorite books in general. Really smart, really grounded and practical. Jonathan is now at nyu. He's an editor of the positive psychology journal Flourishing and just excited to be chatting today. Thanks for taking the time, John.

My pleasure, Brian. Good to be here.

So the Happiness Hypothesis, you basically frame a couple different hypotheses and then you present your hypothesis about happiness. Can you give us the high level overview of that?

Sure. So the book started out because I was teaching introductory psychology at the University of Virginia and I would try to illustrate psychological ideas by having quotes from the ancients. And for a while it looked like I might not get tenure. My publication was going slowly and I thought, well, if I don't get tenure at uva, I don't want to transfer down to a, down to a third rate university. I think I will just, look, leave the academic world and try my hand at writing popular books on psychology. And wouldn't it be fun to collect all those quotes I've been using for Psych 101 and collect them all together and then write chapters on whether they're true or not. So that was the origin of the book. It was really just a kind of an escape path from the academy if I failed to get tenure. And it was originally going to be called 12 great truths and Insights into Mind and Heart from Modern, from Ancient Cultures and Modern Psychology. And because after I, so I started, well, I did get tenure, just barely, but I did get it and I decided to write the book anyway. And so I just started reading all these ancient texts, you know, east and west, you know, the Bhagavad Gita and Confucius and the Quran and the, the Old and New Testament. And I would just collect all the psychological claims and I put them into clusters and I thought maybe there are 12 main ones that I wanted to write about. And then I submitted the first manuscript, the first idea for the book, and I started working on it with basic books and I started running out of time and so I had to actually write faster. And I decided to change the title to 10 great insights into Mind and Heart. So that's an old Mel Brooks joke if anyone's seen History of the World Part 2. But so I didn't think it was a book about happiness originally. I thought it was a book about ancient ideas and basic books. The publisher, the title is a marketing decision. The title is not up to the author, the title is up to the publisher. And they came up with this title, the Happiness Hypothesis. And at first I didn't really like it, in part because I, you know, the book, I mean, happiness is a big theme of the book, but it's about a lot of stuff. It's about virtue and hypocrisy and all sorts of things that the ancients talked about. But by the time I finished the revisions, I realized that actually there are three hypotheses about happiness. And so I thought the title actually works pretty well. So the first hypothesis about happiness is that happiness comes from getting what you want. And that might be why we try to get so much stuff and we work so hard for things, we think it'll make us happy. But the book covers all the research on why it is that. The happiness of attaining your goals is very short lived. People are often surprised. You can work for years for something and when you succeed, you're happy that day, maybe the day after. But it doesn't usually last more than a day or two. We quickly reset our expectations and we're on to the next thing. So a more sophisticated version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness can never come from making the world meet your demands. Happiness comes from changing yourself. It comes from within. And the Buddhists and the Stoics certainly said that. Many ancient wise people said that. And that's a better one. And that's the one that I thought was the right one when I started writing the book. But by the time I finished writing the book, I decided that that might be a good approach for people who lived in the ancient world where terrible things could happen to you without warning the next day. Disease, raiders from the next tribe, warfare, all kinds of starvation, all kinds of bad things can happen to you. But today it's not like that. Today it actually is worth striving. It really is worth striving to get certain things right. And that's the final version of the happiness hypothesis, that happiness comes from between, from getting the right relationship between yourself and others, yourself and your work and yourself and something larger than yourself. If you work and you can work to get those three relationships better, you will then be about as happy as you can be.

Amazing, wonderfully encapsulated. And thanks for the historical journey, which in itself is a lesson.

Right? Yeah. The autobiography that's Right. Life throws you all kinds of curves. You don't know what's going to happen, but it's still a lot. Not much danger of death these days. That's the key thing.

So. Good. Well, I want to look at some of my favorite big ideas and at the top of my list is the frame you use to describe Freud's relationship between, between the ego, the SuperEGO and the ID. You call it the writer and the elephant. Can you talk to us about that?

Sure. So something I realized in teaching is that you can't just lay out facts and then give evidence. It's really hard to pay attention to that. You need to tell stories and use metaphors because our minds are story processors. Little kids have no trouble tuning in if you put something in the form of a story. But if you try to explain something Factually, even to 18 year old kids in Psych 101, it's hard for them to pay attention. So I like to use a lot of metaphors and stories and you know, one thing I saw in reading all these ancient works is that lots of, lots of cultures have conceptualized the mind as being divided into parts that sometimes conflict. That actually was Great truth number one in my Psych 101 class. The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. And of course, Freud was the master at observing, observing these splits and explaining them. And we all have this experience of what he called intrapsychic conflict. And how do you control your mind? How do you make it do what you want? How do you, how do you make yourself get up at the time you want to or not eat the desserts that you want to? And so we've all had this experience and the most obvious metaphor is a horse and rider. And Plato used that metaphor. Plato gave us the idea in the Phaedrus, I think it was that the mind is divided or the soul is like a charioteer guiding two horses. And the horses there are the emotions, there's the dumb emotions and the dumb passions and the good passions. But the charioteer is reason. So I thought about that metaphor and I ultimately decided. Now I honestly don't know if I stole this from Buddha or if I thought of it independently. But I started thinking of it as though, well, you know, a horse is kind of, I want something much bigger and smarter. Because now we know the unconscious. I mean Freud's unconscious was pretty smart, but in a devious sort of way. Now we know that almost everything that goes on in our minds is unconscious. So the more modern view of the Unconscious is that it's wise, it's very good at certain processes, and it's gigantic compared to the conscious. So I decided to have it be a rider and an elephant. I thought that was better than, much better than a horse and rider. And then as I was writing, I realized that Buddha says a man must tame his mind as an elephant trainer tames an elephant. Now, I'd read Buddha at various points in my life, so odds are I just got it from him. I don't know.

But unconscious working.

Yeah, that's right. But at least here I certainly give him credit in the book. And so that is the metaphor. So when I die, if I'm remembered for one thing, it'll probably be that metaphor because it seems to be a very sticky metaphor. Psychotherapists love it. Lots of people write to me and tell me that it really helps them. It's just the basic idea that your conscious mind, what you're aware of, is like a little boy perched on the back of an elephant. And maybe you can kind of kick him or pull his ears or something, and you can try to make him go to the right or the left. And if he's not doing anything, he'll do it. But if the elephant decides that he wants to go to the left, he's really strong and you really can't stop him. And so once you see that you are not the rider, you are the whole thing. You are the rider is the conscious part. The elephant is the intuitive, automatic part. And maturity, human maturity, is understanding how you work and getting those two parts to work in greater harmony and immaturity. You know, we all know friends who are just, you know, really messed up. They're, they're always making bad decisions. They, you know, they, they might know what the right thing is to do, but you know, they're not going to do it because they have no self control. Those are people who have not gotten the right relationship between the rider and their elephant.

That's great. And so what are some practical tips to get a better relationship?

So one thing is to, first of all, to respect the elephant, to not treat it as stupid or something. To be completely dominated. For example, the way I write or the way I make decisions is I try to go through all the relevant stuff, all the relevant factors, and I'll even schedule that I'll put on my schedule, like think about X and I'll kind of mull it over, maybe I'll make some notes. But then I wait a day or two because you have to mull Stuff the elephant is really good at mulling stuff. And then you'll just see things that you didn't see when you thought you were laying out all the facts. So consult it, respect it. That's one thing. Another is train it. Train it as you would train any animal. And so, for example, if you, most of your listeners will have trained a dog at some point in their lives. And with a dog, you cannot train the dog by saying, okay, look, Rover, if you roll over, I am going to make you a steak dinner tonight. It's not just he doesn't understand English. If you give him a really big reward 10 minutes after a behavior, he will never, ever learn. Never, never. Dogs can't learn that way. The reward has to come very, very quickly, like within seconds of a behavior. So gradual tuning up, gradual training is the way to change the elephant. Most of us, this is the problem with New Year's resolutions. It's. The problems with so much is we think that if you get the rider to say something or like an ethics pledge or an honor of code, those sorts of things, the rider can say anything he wants, but he's not really in charge. And if you want to cultivate better behavior, be it health behavior, moral behavior, the two ways you really have to go about it are train the elephant gradually or change the path. And this is actually an insight from Chip and Dan Heath. They have this wonderful book called Switch. They called me up, I know Chip Heath is a fellow social psychologist. He called me up a number of years ago and said, John, we really like your metaphor. Is it okay if we use it in the book? And I said, take my metaphor, please. You know, no need to pay me royalties, just use it. You write best selling books, so they use it. And because of that, people buy my book too. But they add this thing, it's so obvious and so powerful. There's the rider and the elephant, but the elephant is on a path. And as we know in social psychology training, somebody is really hard and the results are usually small. But making a tiny change to the environment can have a huge impact on behavior. And so just a nice example is if you want to. Suppose you want to make yourself go running every morning. You want to exercise more and you resolve to do it. But you know, as Jerry Seinfeld says, you know, morning guy and evening guy are not the same person. And evening guy can resolve to go run in the morning, but morning guy says, nah, I'm too tired. But if you understand that, you understand how this all works, then you would do Things like say, okay, I'm going to. First I'm going to hang my running shoes and my running clothes, like, right on the handle of the bathroom door so that even to go to the bathroom I have to touch it. And that's going to make me more likely to get dressed in it. And my run is going to be to a donut shop. I'm going to run to a donut shop and have a delicious donut two miles away. Because even if on net you might gain weight from that, if you do it for a few weeks, you'll cultivate the habit. And once you cultivate the habit, then it's easy to maintain it. It's the first up to 10, about 11 weeks. The research has 10 to 12 weeks. After that, a habit is really going to stick. And if, you know, if you develop a good habit for life, it's worth eating a couple dozen donuts to get there.

I love it. And this is great. So the incremental gains and then the small but significant environmental shifts, and that leads to another one of my favorite big ideas from your book, the idea that epiphanies don't become lasting change until we do basically, the things you just described. Right.

Well, they become. Yeah, epiphanies are so interesting. I got really interested in them because, you know, I'm interested in morality. I study morality is really what I do. Happiness is a kind of a sideline. My main academic research is on morality, and I've always been interested. You know, I thought originally in grad school I would develop some method of teaching morality or training adolescents. But gradually I came to see, no, that really didn't work. I mean, if you're, you know, if you're the parent, you can control the environment. You have a little control, but not that much. You know, if you're the US Military and you have people at a military academy, you can control them for 24 hours a day for four years. You can leave a little bit of a lasting impact. It's not huge. And so it's really hard to change the elephant, even with years of experience. But there are all these cases of religious conversion experiences, cases where somebody changed. And it's always a moral change when someone has these spontaneous peak experiences that Abe Maslow described. And there's a wonderful book called Quantum Change by Miller is the first author. So people have these experiences and they always come out of them resolving to be more loving, more generous to, you know, they don't become more materialistic. It's a real ethical transformation. Well, William, James, of course, is the classic in the variety of religious experience. He has two chapters on spontaneous conversion experiences. So they're super interesting because you can get real moral change in the space of a few minutes. And it lasts. It lasts weeks or months. But here's the kicker, it doesn't last years unless you support it. We all, you know, we. There's a kind of a. Sometimes you might think of it as a set point, like for happiness or other things, if you can have whatever epiphany you want and feel that you're a different person. But once you go back to your job and your friends and your routine, you'll go back to your old self over time. And so it's very important, if you have an epiphany, you want to support it, to develop some additional friendships or new friendships to change your environment. The Buddha understood this very well. That's why Buddhists talk about the Eightfold Noble Path to enlightenment. It's not just meditating and achieving insights. You have to get the right community to support it.

So good. And then to create that lasting change out of that. I love it. And then you just mentioned meditation. So let's go there. Meditation. You have my absolute favorite passage on the power of meditation, which I've shared I don't know how many times.

What do I say?

Okay, you say, I'll read this right now. You say, suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety, to increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good. Increased self esteem, empathy and trust. It even improves memory. Suppose finally that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now, would you take it? The pill exists. It's called meditation.

Yeah. When you do the research on it, I mean, so research in meditation is a little tricky because it's an area that has so many true believers and people who love it and desperately want it to be good. So some of the research, at least when I reviewed it back in 2004, 2005, a lot of the research was very sloppy. But I reviewed what I could, and the best research did seem to show that it really does have all these good effects and there's not a single negative side effect. You know, whereas with Prozac and those pills, you know, they work. Tried them, but, you know, they, they mess with your body. You know, you feel. I felt as though they were like workmen banging around in my brain when I, when I was on those and at times in my Life, especially when I'm emotionally, you know, when there's just a lot going on and I'm anxious. I've done meditation and within a couple weeks, it really, really helps. What it helps is, you know, you come to see you get practiced at letting go of things, at letting go of thoughts and seeing thoughts just floating on past like foam on a stream or like clouds passing you in the air. And so you just, you train. I'd say you're training the elephant and you're training your mental habits to let go of things rather than perseverate. One of my favorite psychological quotes from the Simpsons is a scene where Homer, Homer says, shut up brain, or I'll stab you with a Q tip. And you know, that's the way it often feels. You know, you have these repetitive thoughts. I know, you know, whenever I have an argument with my wife or, you know, I'm repetitively going over my side of the story and like I know what I'm doing. I recognize that these are cognitive distortions from cognitive therapy. You know, this is bad thinking. And I say, stop it, stop it. But it's hard. But meditation really helps you stop it. It really helps you gain control. It helps you get a harmonious relation between the rider and the elephant. And that's of course why Buddha talked about the mind that way. And that's why Buddha was such an advocate of meditation. And when I say Buddha, I really should say the whole Hindu tradition out of which Buddhism grows. I mean, Buddhism was drawing from a very ancient Hindu tradition of meditation. But, you know, this is, the whole book is about the wisdom of the ancients. And what I found is, you know, the ancients knew nothing about chemistry and physics. I mean, they were just horrible. But when it comes to consciousness, they were as good as anything we have today.

It's amazing. So let's go to what we have today, and you referenced it just a moment ago, cognitive therapy. So talk to us about why you're such a fan, why it works, what it's about, et cetera.

So cognitive therapy is the most widely used form of therapy. Now there's a couple of real conundrums with psychotherapy. One that's been known about since the 60s or 70s is that when you compare psychotherapy to placebo, for most conditions, it's better than a placebo. But every form of psychotherapy works about as well as every other. And it's very hard to identify exactly why any form works. So this is a long standing puzzle. And if that's true, then you should just pick the kind that is easiest and has the best success rate in terms of people sticking with it. So, for example, this is why. I mean, meditation is actually kind of hard. A lot of people drop out. It takes a lot of perseverance and skill. Practice, practice. I should say cognitive therapy is really easy. You can just buy the book Feeling Good by David Burns, and it's a pop psych book. It's incredibly easy to read. And he reports a study in the beginning that shows that people who read an earlier version of the book, if you just read the book, you actually get symptom relief better than placebo. What I love about it is that you learn the names of these distortions. And once you have names like the fortune teller error, you know, people say, oh, I can't go to the party. If I go to the party, you know, looking like this, with this blemish on my face, everyone's gonna laugh at me. And then they'll, you know, they'll think this of me. I mean, we predict the future in a ridiculous way, or we is one or catastrophizing. If I do something wrong, then a terrible thing will happen. I'll get fired from my job. Emotional reasoning. If I'm feeling threatened, then he was threatening me. So once you have names for these distortions, you kind of laugh at them. You say, oh, there I go again. There's that fortune teller error. And you learn a technique for writing down on paper what your repetitive thought is, what feelings that's giving you, what the actual facts of the situation are, what another interpretation of those facts are, which is more conducive to equanimity and more conducive to more in tune with reality. And then once you reframe it, you feel relief. You actually feel the anxiety decreasing. You feel it drifting away. And so I've just described to you the process of cbt. But now let me actually. So chapter two of the Righteous mind. I'm sorry, of the happiness hypothesis opens. So each chapter in the book opens with quotes from the ancients that illustrates the psychological truth. And here are the two that open. Chapter two, changing your mind. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it. That's from Marcus Aurelius and the same idea from Buddha. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday. And our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind. Later in the chapter, I cite the quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Let's see. Wait, there's Nothing. Oh, yes. There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So this is a great truth of psychology. And CBT is the most focused technique for taking advantage of it. Life itself is but what you deem it. So let's look carefully, let's come up with another appraisal, and voila. I reinterpret what happened at the party last night, and suddenly my anxiety is gone.

That's amazing. And practice it again and again and again. Incremental changes. The elephant gets trained.

Exactly. That's right. It's training. That's right. And so you don't need to talk about your childhood with a psychotherapist, with a, you know, a Freudian analyst. You don't even. I mean, look, often people do have real problems in their relationships and they have to. So, you know, a general purpose psychotherapist is a wonderful thing and many people do need it. But for people of habitual, if their chronic problem is anxiety or depression, CBT is the most effective non therapy. I mean, sorry, non drug technique. Others will work as well overall, but CBT is so easy to do that people really stick with it and get very lasting results.

So good. Couple other things. I want to chat about Vertical coherence. Talk to us about vertical coherence as it relates to our goal setting and striving and all that good stuff.

Yeah. This is probably the most subtle concept in the book, and I think you are the first person ever to ask me about it. It's one of my favorite concepts, but it's not one that's gotten a lot of. Lot of pickup. In chapter 10 of the book, which is the one on meaning in life. It's the one that kind of brings everything together and presents the idea that happiness comes from between. I talk about this really great idea that I got from Mike Csikszentmihalyi, who studies flow. And he and Gene Nakamura developed this interesting concept called vital engagement. So vital engagement isn't just like, oh, I like horror, horror films, or, you know, I collect model airplanes. Vital engagement. Let me see if I have a definition here. Let's see. Okay. They studied the end state of this deepening process and called it vital engagement, which they define as, quote, a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences, experiences of flow, which is enjoyed absorption, and by meaning, which is subjective significance. Okay, to unpack that. The example I give is when I tried to teach this concept in my flourishing class at the University of Virginia. There was a woman. There's a student in the class who had been very quiet all semester. And. But I knew from some things she'd said that she loved horses. She was really into riding and horses. And so I asked her about it and you know, she like, what do you do? And she told us a little bit about it and then she stopped. But then I asked her, how did you get involved in riding? And that really started her talking about her early experiences. And I asked her if she knew the names of 10 horses from previous centuries. And she did. The point is, no normal person would know that. But if horses become your life and your friends are all horse people and you read about the history of horses, you'll know that stuff. Now it might sound, you know, if you're not into it might sound like, oh, what a silly thing to know. But imagine a life in which you have deep passions that you share with other people and a skill that you practice. You know, she was on the equestrian team at uva. And a life with one or two of those is a much richer life than a life that has no deep engagement with something like that. You know, for a lot of us, it's our work. I mean, I really, really love psychology. I have like, I have no hobbies whatsoever because I, you know, I just, I love psychology and the social sciences and I just love, you know, reading about it and learning new things. So that for me, this is my vital engagement.

Another one of my favorite ideas, and perhaps the favorite idea because I so resonate with the idea of applied virtue. Arete, can you talk to us about what virtue in that sense means? We're not talking about the kind of traditional sense of morality, but the sense of really expressing the highest version of ourselves. Can you tell us about that?

Sure. So virtues of an interesting word. It has a connotation of sort of prudish 19th century Victorianism. And before that, Ben Franklin talked about the virtues. And a funny thing happened in Western philosophy about morality is we dropped that old virtue based approach and we've come to think that morality is about either protecting people from harm. If you're a utilitarian, you want to reduce harm, or it's about justice and rights. If you're a deontologist or a follower of Immanuel Kant, you'll think that morality is about justice and rights. And the philosophers, those two schools of philosophy, battle it out. But I think both of them are kind of at odds with human nature. Human nature is not really utilitarian. We're self centered, we care about our groups. We're not very good at really Caring about maximizing utility overall, all sentient beings. And we're not very good at really respecting rights in the abstract. We're very biased about a lot of things. And I think a conception of virtue or conception of morality that says that. Well, actually, you know, cultivating morality isn't being a saint. It's not devoting your life to saving others. It's cultivating your own excellences. And many of these excellences, the virtues that people have talked about for thousands of years, are really skills that make you a fit partner for social interaction, for people to trust you, work with you, hire you. And so Ben Franklin, let me see if I can find his list of virtues here. Ben Franklin's autobiography is just a wonderful, wonderful book. He developed this program. He wrote down all the things he wanted to improve about himself. And there were, I think, 12 or 13 of them. And. And he would go through each day, he would devote himself to one of them. But he was one of the most effective people in American history. He convinced France to join us in fighting Britain when France had very little to gain. And in fact, it bankrupted them and led indirectly to the French Revolution. I mean, boy. And had he not succeeded, we would have lost. He was an incredibly effective politician, diplomat. He was good with the ladies. I mean, he was just an incredible person. And, you know, anyway, so it's a wonderful book. I recommend to all your readers to read the autobiography of Ben Franklin, if they haven't. But I think this is a good way to think about self improvement. It's really like gardening. It's like cultivating, over time, cultivating habits and skills. Meditation can help you, for example, loving kindness. Meditation can help make you more loving. Cultivating habits of self discipline or honesty or honor. I mean, there are all sorts of habits that you can cultivate. I think this is a much more human and humane way to think about morality, moral development, growth, self improvement. And I think there's not quite enough guidance for us in our modern culture, but we took a wrong turn in the 19th century. But if you go back to the. Go back to the Victorian era, the revolutionary era, this is the way people thought about it, and this is what people tried to do with their children. And so the modern character education movement is, I guess, as an example. So there are people who are talking about this, but this is, I think, the right way to think about self improvement.

Yeah, I say that if there's one word to summarize my entire approach, it's art. It's, can we train ourselves to express the Highest version of ourselves in whatever context, moment to moment to moment, which is obviously a lifetime endeavor. But it's the those little things, those little opportunities of shaping our consciousness and draining that elephant. Amazing. So I'd like to wrap up these chats with two questions, one on your practices. So the things that you do on a daily or weekly basis that help you live the way that you aspire to live, are you open to sharing some of those things you do?

Oh, sure, sure. Well, first I can say that when I first had the idea for the book, I was, I guess in my early 30s. I was single, I was completely overworked, working all the time at the University of Virginia, trying to publish to get tenure. And then all at the same time, I got tenure, met my wife, began to get some academic success. And so the conditions. So if my formula here is that happiness comes from between, from getting the right relationship between yourself and others, yourself and your work and yourself in something larger than yourself, I didn't have that for a while in my life. And I was anxious and unhappy. And then over the course of a couple years, I got all of that. And so my betweens have been very good since then. And my mental health has been very good since then. Not always. I mean, I sometimes go through periods of anxiety, but they're mostly about like, ah, I can't, I can't do everything. I have to. I'm, you know, I have to rush. I can't give anyone the time. I can't do anything right. You know, and I have, I know consciously that this is my life, that my life is objectively extremely good. It's, you know, it's better than I ever could have hoped that it was going to work out. And so I got to stop thinking that I'm someday going to catch up. I've got to just accept that this is what life is. It's just too much stuff all the time. And there's a lot of stress in just in terms of that you can't do it all and you have to disappoint some people. And so what I've begun doing recently is I've actually begun meditating again. And I actually picked this up because so I had. There was a wonderful young man named Brian Turner who was the. I had hired him as the director of my project@ethicalsystems.org and he was as devoted to self improvement as possible. And he listened to every book on tape. He tried out all the advice he ever read. Oh, I should have hooked him up with philosopher's notes, he would have read them all.

Let's make sure we do that.

Well, he was a BASE jumper, a parachutist, and he died. And in writing his eulogy and in learning more about his life and thinking about his life, I realized that his devotion to these simple practices and self improvement is something that I should be doing, that everybody should do. But it's only because of Brian that I started meditating again. And it's just been wonderful. I can feel the results of it during my day. You know, if something goes wrong, something bad happens, it's easier to let go of. And so, you know, sometimes it takes, you know, it takes a shock, it takes an exemplar to, you know, kick us in the constructs, as it were, and make us change our ways. But I guess what I want to leave your listeners with is the idea that the tools are out there to make yourself a better, happier and more effective person. And many of the tools are very, very easy to use. They just require generally, they require daily use. There's nothing you can do that's going to solve your problems or change you in five or ten minutes, but five or ten minutes a day? Yes. So think about ways to train the elephant, get better harmony between the elephant and the rider. I would also include some exercise. Getting regular exercise doesn't have to be much. You know, keep your body and mind healthy and in harmony. So there are some simple things you can do to make yourself much happier.

So good.

Let me just end the last thing piece of advice is if readers go to if listeners go to happinesshypothesis.com there on the homepage I have a link. It says using the happiness hypothesis to increase your happiness. And I go through five steps you can take today to begin increasing your happiness.

Awesome. Well, that might be. That's one final thing that I'm excited to share with people. And we'll put a link to that below this chat as well. If you could share one thing, the final question I'd like to ask is if you could share just one thing with someone aspiring to optimize their lives, what would that one thing be?

I think I would say not one, but two things that are paired. The first is diagnose yourself. Know whether you are a person who is on the bottom half of the happiness distribution or on the top half. And what you should do is going to be very different depending on where you are. And there are tools in positive psychology. If you go to authentichappiness.org, you can take a variety of tests, understand your strengths and weaknesses, your happiness level, and then, especially if you're on the bottom half, then there are things you can do to improve your mental hygiene. And I would recommend most especially either meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy. So, okay, that's not one step, but it is a kind of diagnosis and response. How's that?

This is fantastic, Ian. I just appreciate you and your wisdom and also your humanity and your willingness to share so much of what you're up to. So thank you for your great work. Thanks for taking the time, and I'm really excited to share this with our community.

My pleasure. Brian. I really enjoyed reading your philosopher's notes, and I've enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, John.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit brianjohnson me for more. Sam.