PNTV: The Happiness Track by Emma Seppälä (#369)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, the Happiness Track by Emma Seppala. The Happiness Track Subtitle how to apply the science of happiness to accelerate your success. Emma Seppala is the head of Stanford's center for Compassion and Altruism Research, which is extraordinarily cool in its own right. And she basically tells us there's a science to happiness that leads to our success. Unpacks it in this great little book, which I very much enjoyed. I'm a huge fan of the Science well being, as you know, if you follow much of my work, we have dozens of the best books on the science of well being profiled in our Positive Psychology section. We've got a class on positive psychology 101 you might enjoy. Check that out at Optimize Me Psychology, I think is the URL. If not, I'll make sure it is. Anyway, we got a philosopher's note with a bunch of my favorite big ideas and five of them here. Let's jump in. First big idea is from the first chapter of the book, which is called Stop Chasing the Future. Stop chasing the future. What should you do? You should carpe. Now we talk about carpe diem, carpe punctum, carpe momentum, all these different ways to get into the moment. And Emma starts her book off with the fact that, look, if you're constantly chasing the future. Now, of course, we want to have ambitious goals that really fire us up. Here's our awesome, big, hairy, audacious goal that inspires us. Fantastic. We want to have that. And then we want to bring ourselves into the moment. And she says there's a science that demonstrates unequivocally the truth of carpe diem, of seizing the day, seizing the moment. Carpe punctum, carpe momentum, however we want to describe it, style being 100% right here, right now, in pursuit of goals that have meaning for us, but not always living in the future and never enjoying the moment, then we're not here. We're neither going to be happy or inflow and productive and creative and experience the outcomes we want to see. So hold your big goals, get fired up about them, run them through the whoop analysis that we talk about all the time, right? Make sure they're challenging, meaningful and doable, and then put yourself in this moment and. And remember, carpe diem sees the day really means in its Latin translation, it's more accurately translated as pluck the day. You don't need to grab it like it's going to be taken from you. Pluck it like a piece of ripe fruit from a tree and then enjoy it. Be here right now in this moment. That's our number one idea from the first chapter. Carpe. Now, second big idea is from the second chapter. So if we want to stop chasing the future, which was the subject of the title of the first chapter, the second chapter was called Step out of Overdrive. So too many of us in pursuit of success, we're living at that red line, right? So two aspects here of stepping out of overdrive. We've talked about the need to oscillate many, many times, right? We want to go like this. We don't want to limp at this constant state of on. That is not going to work for us. We want to ride the stress waves is how Emma Seppala describes it. Right? And it's in two functions. We want to step out of overdrive as it relates to always being on and not baking in enough recovery. And then she says we want to get really good at cultivating our resilience. So the scientific definition of resilience is essentially our ability to bounce back. How quickly can we recover from a stress, kind of like Marcus Aurelius equanimity game, right when he got knocked off center, which will happen. We don't need to be stressed about that. See how fast you can get back. See how fast you can get back. That's the essence of resilience and literally making it a game. And the only way you can do that is if you're able to step back outside of that and see what's going on and then choose our wisest response as we cultivate that and learn to ride those stress waves as mindfully as we can. And again, you can't do that if you're constantly on. And remember, you want to be on. You want to be off. And off is not checking your email or checking the latest push notification or reading news. Off is going for a walk, hanging out with your family and quiet. No smartphone time, going for a hike, meditating, petting your dog, whatever you can do to really, really recover so you can ride those stress waves as well and optimally as you can. We're not trying to get rid of them. We're trying to ride them as gracefully as we can. The third big idea is one of the most powerful ways we can do that, which is our breath. Now, again, at Emma's research center at Stanford, they do a lot of Work on compassion and altruism and mindfulness. And one of the key ways that we can handle the barrage of stress that's coming at us that puts us into these stress waves of the sympathetic system being turned on. Our fight or flight system is basically always on. We've used the metaphor of the fact that we evolved to deal with one lion in a jungle at a time. But these days, it's as if the entire jungle is roaring at us all day, every day. We experience more stimuli in the span of something like a week than our ancestors did in our entire lifetime. We simply didn't evolve to manage the onslaught of information. And a huge percentage of that information is not positive. We just didn't evolve to handle that as well as we could. How do you deal with that? A lot of different ways, but you need to get out of the sympathetic into the parasympathetic, and then. And the fastest way to do that is via your breath. So Emma talks about the same thing we talked about with Barbara Fredrickson in Love 2.0. Your breath stimulates your vagus nerve, right? The wandering nerve that connects your mind, your brain, and your heart and your gut. And simply training yourself to breathe properly, which is deeply into your diaphragm. Inhaling slowly, exhaling slowly, rhythmically. And Emma stresses, emphasizing the exhale, exhaling longer than your inhale is one of the most direct ways to flip the switch from your sympathetic to your parasympathetic. To calm your brain and your body and have that sense of energized calm, calm energy. That's what we want to have. And our breath, again, is our strongest vehicle to that point. It's literally like flipping a switch, decreasing your heart rate and increasing your calm. So, again, we've talked about different breath counts. Find one that works for you. My favorite is inhaling for six, holding for one, exhaling for eight, in for six, holding for one, exhaling for eight. That works for me. Find a rhythm that works for you, and then lock it in. It's my practice. It's what I do in all my meditations. It's what I do whenever I'm taking a nap. Start that. Do five repetitions. It's before I go to sleep, I have this almost like an anchor slash security blanket, if you will. Trigger cue to relaxation. That's both a psychological trigger and also a very powerful physiological trigger for me now to really slow down, shut my mind off, and to drop out of an intense mode into a relaxed mode. Become really good friends with your breath. Ride these Stress waves. Well, our fourth big idea is Jack Ma. You might have heard of Jack Ma. He is, at least at one point, was the wealthiest person in China. But before he became this uber $25 billion plus worth entrepreneur, he experienced a ton of failure in his life. And Emma kind of puts him up as an exemplar of finding success in failure. And she has a great passage from him where he describes the fact that with all the failures that he experienced, he had the experience be a success. And that might sound, you know, nice and intellectually satisfying. Yeah, you want to find success in all experiences, even failures. But get this. Jack Ma, again, we look at him and we think, wow, this guy's super successful. He's worth $25 billion. Wealthiest person in China. Amazing. But get this. He failed his entrance exams to university twice. Then he finally got into the university, graduated, applied for dozens of jobs, got rejected, finally got a job as a translator, being paid next to nothing, and then he wound up getting assigned to some project in the States. He came up with an idea for a startup. He failed twice, drove two companies into the ground, but he didn't give up. Throughout all of this, he saw the experience whether it was a failure or not. A lot of his experiences as a young man were failures. He saw that as success. He was learning. Right? That win or learn attitude, again, very easy to intellectually get. Much, much harder to put yourself out there and to fail again and again and again. But to find the experience that allows you to get a little bit better the next time around and continue to pursue it. Growth, mindset, style. We want to train that. In the note, I quote J.K. rowling. She was rejected I don't know how many times for the Harry Potter series, but it was a lot, a lot more times than most people would endure. And guess what? She's now sold 400 million copies or something absurd like that. I'm rereading her books now with my son, Emerson. Unbelievable. And to imagine that that almost didn't come to fruition. A crazy number of publishers rejected her, yet she kept on persevering. We want to find that as we move forward. Which leads us to our next big idea. One of the sources of grit is kindness. Emma makes the point. And again, her lab is all about compassion and altruism, that we are wired for kindness. And she shares a number of really inspiring research studies on this. Here's a couple of them. So one of them is bring people into a lab, put them into an FMRI or whatever, and measure their brains Right. What you'll see is you can light up their pleasure centers by basically giving them money. And watch their brain. Boom. Pleasure center. Awesome. Thank you. And you can have them watch a charity getting money. Boom. Same pleasure center lights up for someone else. A charity receiving money. That's amazing. We are wired for compassion. To experience someone else's gain in the same way we experience our gain. And she shares another study. Bring people back into a lab. This time, give them some cash and give them two options. One group spends the money on themselves. The other group gives some money or spends the money on someone else. Guess what? This group that spent the money on someone else is happier than the group that spent it on themselves. Again, we are wired for compassion. So as we strive to optimize and actualize our potential, let's remember why we're doing so. Such that we can give our gifts in greatest service to the world. Enjoying the process but knowing that our ultimate success is tied to this level of kindness. And you go back to the grit that Jack Ma demonstrated. And you go to Angela Duckworth. Her four ideas of how to scientifically build grit. We had the passion, we had the practice, and then we had purpose. The purpose is something bigger than you. Connect to something bigger than you. Especially in the times where you're feeling stressed. Think about the individual or group of people for whom you are committed to to actualizing. That's what it's all about. Remember, we are wired for kindness. Find a way to give yourself to the world a little bit more today. Or maybe just go give a hug to someone you love right now. Remember Jack Ma? Literally. The guy went from failure to failure to failure to failure to failure. Winds up this extraordinary success. Failed his entrance exams to university twice, was rejected from dozens of jobs, drove two startups into the ground and created $25 billion of wealth afterwards. That requires a growth mindset and truly finding the lessons in each experience, whether they're a success or failure. We talked about the stress waves and your breath. The best way to navigate stress is to connect to your breath. Literally. Flip the switch off your sympathetic into your recovery parasympathetic mode. One deep diaphragmatic breath through your nose at a time as you carpe. When? Now. Quit manically going after the future, stressing yourself out. Have your big goals. Bring yourself back to this moment. Carpe now. Pluck that wonderful delicious fruit that is the present moment today. And make today another awesome day. I hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more soon. See ya.

To learn more about the 300 day optimize Coach program visit Optimize Me Coach.

Hi, this is Brian with some super exciting news. Optimize is now absolutely free. All 600 philosopher's notes, the 50101 masterclasses, thousand optimize, plus ones free. So what do you want to optimize today? Your productivity, habits?

Sleep?

Mental toughness? We've got 33 categories here, each of which comes with its own Optimal Living 101 masterclass and a collection of Philosopher's.

Notes to help you go to your.

Next level with more wisdom in less time.

We've had tens of thousands of people.

From nearly every country in the world sign up for our premium membership offering, which we have now made.

Did I mention absolutely free?

Come join us. Optimize Me More Wisdom in Less Time. Let's optimize every aspect of your life so we can go out and change the world 1% at a time together. Starting with you and me today.