PNTV - Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Episode number three. We know that ten minutes goes fast. We're going to jump right in today. We're going to do an awesome book called Happy for no Reason by Marci Schaimoff. She rocks. She is the woman who came up with the idea for Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul. This book, Happy for no Reason. The subtitle is Seven Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out. It's kind of like Chicken Soup for the Soul meets Positive psychology. She interviewed 100 of what she called the happy 100 people, ranging from Reverend Michael Beckwith, the guy from the Secret, to Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray Love. She interviewed all these awesome people who were super happy and, and told their stories along with what we know scientifically about positive psychology. So if you caught the episode yesterday, we did. What do we do? The how of Happiness on the Science of Happiness. So I'm on a positive psychology kick right now, and we're going to cover 14 different books on positive psychology. So today, happy for no reason. So we're going to go through a handful of big ideas. We have the customary wine, glass of coconut water. Can't forget that. But we'll start with the idea that being happy for no reason isn't about never experiencing sadness or grief or anger or any of that stuff. It's about having a spaciousness where we hold a certain level of joy and happiness in spite of whatever might be going on in our lives. So it's not about always having a fake happy, smiley bobbing face. It's about having a deep connection to our highest self and being able to see a bigger picture which allows us to be happy for no reason. So there's kind of a continuum that she talks about of happiness. There's unhappiness, which we're all pretty familiar with, I guess it is, you know, depression, all that kind of stuff. Then there's happy for bad reason, which is, you know, cocaine, drugs, other addictions. You're happy not for a good reason. That's happy for bad reason. Then there's happy for good reason. So you got a job promotion, your business is going great, you met someone special, your relationship is fantastic, you had a child. Whatever it is, you're happy for good reason. That's great. The next step is happy for no reason. Whatever is happening in your life, you're happy. You can see every opportunity, every challenge has an opportunity to grow and you can embrace the entire spectrum of emotion and maintain a level of happiness and bliss. That's the idea of happy for no reason. And she actually quotes the Upanishads where they say happiness for any reason is just another form of misery. We want to be able to be so in touch with our highest selves that we can be happy for no reason. This book is all about that. She talks about the happiness set point. I'm not going to go into this today because we did it yesterday in the how of happiness, so check that out. But really fun stuff about the thermostat and how you're naturally going to be brought down to whatever your set point is. And we need to work to increase our levels of happiness. Really powerful stuff. One of my favorite ideas in this book, and out of a thousand big ideas, there are over a thousand big ideas in all 100 of these notes. This is one of my favorite ones, this next big idea. So she talks about the fact that in Thomas Jefferson's day, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and he said that Americans had the right to, what is it? Freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Right? When he was talking about the pursuit of happiness, he wasn't talking about chasing after happiness. He was talking about practicing happiness. In his time, whatever it is, 250 years or so almost ago, the pursuit of happiness meant the practice of happiness. So you pursued law, you practice law or medicine, you practiced medicine and being a doctor. So same with happiness. We have the right to practice happiness. And it takes, as we talked about yesterday, about the same amount of attention. If you want to get good in anything, you need to practice. And Marci has an awesome quote here. She says that it's unfortunate that most people spend more time selecting the next car they want to buy than they do figuring out how they can lead a more happy life. So I say, if we're listening to this fellow philosopher, let's put more time into figuring out how we can live a happy life, then into what car we're going to take or. Or what vacation we're going to take next to escape the life we aren't too happy about. So powerful stuff there. She also mentions when I quickly just hit on this and we'll come back to it in the future. She talks about the idea of responsibility. If you break it down into two words, it's response, ability. Happy people have the ability to respond to their situation. They're not knee jerk, reacting, all that kind of stuff. So Stephen Covey, who we're going to do his great book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit number one is be proactive, be response able. Everyone talks about this idea and we're going to talk about it a lot more in the future. But for now we're going to move on to the next big idea, which is I call it Scary Mind and Scary Mind, math and ants.

Right.

And if you don't already know, I'm basing this off of My Philosopher's Note 6 page PDF. You can check it out, click on the Notes link, you can get more on that. But I'm basically using that as a guide and usually it takes me 20 minutes to go through these. We're going to do it in 10 minutes. So scary Mind, math and ants. So get this. Apparently somehow researchers figured out that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day, right? So 60,000 thoughts a day, which is about one thought per second per waking out. Alright, so 60,000 thoughts per day. But what's funny is 95% of those thoughts were the same thoughts we had yesterday. I think that's pretty funny. And what's even funnier, I don't know if it's funny or sad, is the fact that of those thoughts, 80% of them are bad. They're negative. That's 45,000 thoughts every day. If my math is right. I think it is negative thoughts. Isn't that amazing? Basically the same thoughts you had yesterday. And scientists actually call this automatic negative thoughts. Ants A N T. Automatic negative thoughts. We've got ants running around in our heads. You can imagine. And what we want to do is cleanse that. We want to take some organic ant spray and figure out how we can reshape our minds. And again, this book isn't about just, again, the kind of fake happy face, whatever. It's about rewiring our consciousness and being able to adapt our consciousness such that we're inclining our minds to joy. Which is the next big idea I want to share. You might have heard of the story of the Cherokee elder who shares wisdom with his grandson. And he's saying something along the lines of, you know, grandson, there are two wolves. There's a wolf of happiness, a wolf of happiness, and a wolf of unhappiness and despair and anxiety and regret. And they fight each other in your mind, right? And the whoa. And the grandson asks, okay, but which. Which one of the wolves wins that battle? And the elder says, whichever one you feed. Marcy rather shares this story. Awesome story. So which one are you feeding? Are you feeding the happiness wolf? Are you Feeding the unhappiness wolf and she talks about how we want to incline our mind to joy. We want to make it a habit, make it a practice to see beautiful things. What can you appreciate in your life today and how do you make it a habit? Rather than criticizing people and seeing all the things that are going wrong and blaming and all that stuff, see if you can incline your mind to joy. See all the things that are beautiful in people. See all the things that are amazing in your life and incline your mind to joy. We need to work on that because evolutionarily scientists say our minds and Marcy talks about this. Our minds are kind of like Velcro for negative stuff. We hold it, it sticks negative stuff and Teflon for positive stuff. And they say it's evolutionarily adapt. Look at it in old old old times. We needed to remember the negative stuff because we almost died when that saber toothed tiger almost attacked us. We needed to remember that. So we didn't go into that same situation but we didn't remember the positive stuff. So what we want to do is incline our minds so that we have more Velcro on the positive stuff and deal with the fact that we tend to really hold on to the negative stuff. Again, those automatic negative thoughts. Ants, we've got one more minute. So another big idea. We're skipping a bunch of them here. But another big idea is the idea of gratitude. We talked about it yesterday. I mentioned gratitudelog.com it's where I log my gratitude every day. You can find me@gratitudelog.com BrianJohnson Every day I put in the top five things I'm most grateful for. One more thing. Baby steps. It's not about changing your life like that. It's about baby steps and what she calls kaizen. You might have heard of Japanese concept continual improvement. So when we hold the tension between our ideal and our current reality, the way we do that is baby steps. My question for you today is which of these ideas most resonated with you? What baby step can you take today to start integrating it in your life? Think about that. Rock it. Happy for no reason. If you liked it, check out the note and get the book. This book rocks. Alright, that is all for today. Look forward to sharing more with you soon.

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