Arthur C. Brooks | The Atlantic

How to Follow the Right Star

2025-12-25T07:00:00-05:00

A much-loved Christmas story tells about the journey of the Magi—the three Wise Men who came seeking the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews?” they ask. “For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.” The essence of the tale is their unshakable faith in a worldly sign—a star in the sky—which the Magi trusted would guide them to the savior of the world.

This story has inspired Christians for more than two millennia to believe that they can find metaphysical truth and eternal life by following something tangible—the words in a book, say, or a physical sacrament. For some nonreligious people, this belief might seem nonsensical or superstitious. Yet almost everyone acts in some analogous way in their regular life—just as almost everyone wants to be happier.

The problem is that striving for happiness directly, in the abstract, is not possible. Instead, you must choose proxy goals: metaphorical stars in the sky that you can see and judge to lead you to the greater well-being you desire.

This sounds right, but is it true? Is the star you choose really the one that marks the stable you hope to find? Consider the risk that your stated goals are a mirage and lead to nothing—or, worse, to unhappiness. This column is about how you can tell whether you’re following the right star.

Proxy goals are important because they create a sense of direction, without which you cannot make progress, which is itself a source of great satisfaction, at least temporarily. Psychologists have shown in experiments that when people set concrete goals, life feels more manageable, especially for those experiencing depression or anxiety. In fact, goals can be protective against adverse life circumstances: If you don’t like your current employment, professional goal-setting can make your job more bearable.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to make the most of bad gifts]

To improve your long-term well-being, however, not all proxy goals are created equal. They must align with your internal values and interests, which psychologists call “self-concordance.” Self-concordant proxies have three basic characteristics, which bear careful consideration.

The first is that a good proxy goal is non-zero-sum: Achieving it does not mean that someone else cannot also achieve it. An example of a zero-sum goal would be striving to become the CEO of your company: If you’re the CEO, no one else can be (until you quit or get fired). Nothing wrong with wanting to be the leader—but a better, non-zero-sum goal would be an honest assessment of how interesting and challenging you find your work. These are qualities of a role that can be enjoyed by anyone else, not just you. Why is this better? A researcher in 2006 found that non-zero-sum goals such as this raise life satisfaction, whereas competitive, zero-sum goals lower it. You could be a happy CEO, but holding the corner office per se isn’t the star directly over your true aim.

The second criterion for a good proxy goal is why you strive for it: This should be approach, not avoidance. You should follow your purpose for positive reasons, not negative ones. For example, say that to improve your quality of life, your proxy goal is to raise your employability through education. This can be defined as a positive, approach-oriented goal, such as “I want to learn a bunch of new skills.” Or it can be a negative, avoidance-determined goal, such as “I don’t want to wind up poor or unemployed.” As the author of a 2022 research paper in Psychological Reports found, you are much more likely to achieve life satisfaction if you approach this task positively.

Third, the best proxy goals tend to be non-positional, meaning that they are not set to create social comparison. Say you want to buy a house: A positional goal would be to have a house that impresses others; a non-positional goal would be to have a place to raise your family with love and joy, whether or not anyone else is impressed by the place. True, people do get some temporary satisfaction when they are envied by others (we’re only human, after all), but as research has shown, the more important this comparison is to you, the less happy you will end up. Learning to eschew social comparisons is itself a worthy proxy goal for well-being.

Happiness is not a goal you can chase directly. You have to shoot for more tangible proxy goals that you can see and pursue. But not all of these goals will lead you to the happiness that you seek; they have to possess certain characteristics. Here are three axioms to follow that will steer you in the right direction.

1. Focus on people, not things.
As I’ve written previously, happiness is love. If there were a three-word summary of the entire science of happiness—which, fortunately for this columnist, there is not—that would be it. Love is best defined as “to will the good of the other” as judged by the other, meaning that such loving is reserved for living beings. Love is inherently non-zero-sum; it is infinite. It is always positive and, when sincere, not based on any social comparison. Follow stars such as the quality of your relationships and your service to others, and you will be right over the target of happiness.

2. It’s about you and your inner direction, not about how others see you.
We are prone as a species to seek status and rise in social hierarchies. This is probably an evolved trait, because higher status in times of scarce resources usually means a greater likelihood of survival and finding a mate. But as noted, social comparison doesn’t lead to happiness at all, especially today in the age of social media. If your proxy goals revolve around how you compare with others or how others see you, you aren’t on target.

[Arthur C. Brooks: A seasonal guide to better well-being]

3. Make a happy journey your goal, too.
The Magi, of course, went on a literal journey. Yours might be a metaphorical one, but in either case, your objective should be to enjoy it. One danger in the pursuit of life goals is the assumption that once you hit them, the satisfaction you attain will last forever. This is called the arrival fallacy, and it’s a major impediment to happiness; it explains, for example, why champion athletes commonly suffer depression after a long-sought victory. To be sure of a happier outcome, following the three criteria for the right goals helps a great deal, but you should also take care not to disregard the journey itself—and to take joy in it as much as you can. So, for instance, make college attendance about the learning, not your graduation or diploma. Make your dating experience about learning to love someone deeply, not just getting to the altar.

One last point: There will be times in life when you’ll need to deviate from your goals, even if they are perfectly thought out. Circumstances change, typically in ways you don’t like that are beyond your control. Maybe your relationship ends, your employment ends, or someone you love dies. In such adverse circumstances, I’d offer a fourth axiom to keep in mind.

4. Stay flexible, and be ready to find another way.
Your proxy goals today may be outstanding, but they might not work for your happiness tomorrow. Always be ready to look for new ones, without remorse or hesitation. The Three Wise Men followed the star and found the infant Jesus, as promised. But their journey back home was another story. God warned them in a dream that King Herod was lying in wait for them, hoping to interrogate them about the whereabouts of the Messiah with the intention of harming him. The solution? “They departed for their own country another way.”

What I Wish I’d Known When I Was Younger

2025-12-18T12:00:00-05:00

On his 70th birthday, in 1905, Mark Twain gave a speech about the secret to successful aging. (If 70 doesn’t sound aged to you, bear in mind that because of high infant-mortality rates, the average life expectancy for someone born before 1850 was less than 40.) “I have achieved my 70 years in the usual way,” he declared, according to an account in The New York Times, “by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.” The maxim he offered was this: “We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”

Typical for Twain, this was solid folk wisdom wrapped in a joke. The secret to a long and happy life is clearly not smoking, drinking, and carousing. But he’s correct that there is no plug-and-play formula that works for everyone. Within obvious parameters, each of us should experiment with different ideas and specific ways of living, a proposition I have previously discussed. Some people are at their healthiest on a vegetarian diet; others will be so by eating Mediterranean. Some are happiest living in a big metropolis such as New York City and Los Angeles; others are living their best life out in the country.

These details aside, however, a few general habits do matter. I won’t detain you with the health-and-wellness stuff that you might hear from your doctor: Lay off the smokes and go for a walk, for God’s sake. I want instead to call your attention to certain patterns of behavior that are not so obvious but that help explain why old people tend to be happier than young adults. The sooner you can learn and adopt these rules for good living, the sooner you can enjoy their fruits.

No question, you will come across some grouchy, unhappy old people, but on average in the United States, older adults score significantly higher in well-being than younger adults. Older people experience lower psychological distress and negative affect, and more frequent positive affect. I have also written before about how older folks tend to enjoy positive changes to their personality: agreeableness and conscientiousness rise as we age; neuroticism falls. What explains this pattern is not immediately apparent. Without a doubt, acquired wisdom plays a role: Older people have more life data and make fewer errors. But three particular patterns of behavior that old people display do matter a great deal.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be happy growing older]

The first involves social networks. Early in life, you were probably encouraged to develop a wide range of friendships with different kinds of people, for the sake of your happiness. This was good advice insofar as you learned new ways of thinking and living from people outside your typical social circles. But it doesn’t mean that you need to expend special effort maintaining links with lots of people with whom you have superficial ties. This would just fill your free time with unrewarding interactions. Yet precisely this sort of broad but thin acquaintance characterizes the networks of many young adults. Older people selectively narrow their social circles to focus on the individuals with whom they share common passions, experience positive emotions, and derive satisfaction. The casual associates who don’t make the cut are left behind.

This might sound selfish, but people actually become more altruistic as they age—the second pattern of behavior that raises older people’s happiness compared with that of young people. In a 2021 survey of research on self-reported altruism and observed charitable behavior, four psychologists found that 14 of the 16 studies they reviewed revealed that older adults are more focused on others than younger ones. In one especially ingenious demonstration of this finding, researchers asked adults of differing ages to clasp a handheld grip-strength device called a dynamometer and squeeze it with a high level of effort in order to obtain rewards for themselves or others. Younger adults gripped harder than older adults for self-rewards; older adults gripped harder than the younger adults to gain rewards for others.

The third pattern involves how older people react to difficult events in life. As a person ages, they usually get better at both avoiding and dealing with life stress. One 2023 longitudinal study involving nearly 3,000 adults ages 25 to 74 found that 70-year-olds felt stress on 40 percent fewer days than 25-year-olds did. Part of this is because the elders exposed themselves less to stressful events, but it is also because they were less reactive to stressful situations. Some of this is surely down to life circumstances: Retired 70-somethings no longer have demanding jobs. But another factor is that when old people encounter a stressful situation, they tend simply to shrug it off. Whether to respond to a challenging event might not seem voluntary, but in fact, it can be—and when the stress is unavoidable, the elderly simply react less by caring less.

As I was writing this essay, one experience came to mind that reinforced the points above, involving a two-day meeting that I’d attended in Rome some 25 years ago for a large international charity. The conference convened a small group of well-being specialists —some very junior (as I was at the time), some much older and more famous. Among the latter was a 60-year-old woman of global stature in the field. Feeling honored to be in her company, I paid close attention to her behavior. At the time, it seemed a bit strange; now it does not.

She had flown long haul through the night to attend the meeting, without compensation, and participated fully in every session. But when it came to the lavish dinner party held on the last night of the conference—which to me was a great perk—she walked into the bistro and declared, “This place is too loud” and left. This remarkable woman was exhibiting all three happiness patterns: She was spending time professionally with people who shared her passion for a cause, she was making a personal effort and donating her considerable expertise, and she was saying no to something that wasn’t worth the stress and sacrifice for her.

At 36, I was amazed that she’d pass on the party. Today, at 61, I follow her example: I will go to considerable personal effort to serve causes that I care about, and I will discuss matters of spiritual depth or scientific importance for hours on end. But small talk in a noisy bar? No chance.

So what follows are three general rules I learned from older people that lead to higher well-being.

1. Go deep or go home.
I try to ensure that my social relationships—those that are voluntary and involve discretionary time—focus only on facets of life that matter: love, faith, philosophy, virtue, culture, aesthetics. I don’t want to talk about my beach vacation, or yours, unless a major epiphany occurred as the tide came in.

2. Serve more.
A unique channel of well-being is serving others in causes I care about. This can mean giving money and time, of course. But it also entails regularly subjecting my work to a “values test”: Does each activity primarily edify and uplift others?

[Read: Life for 30-somethings is getting more stressful]

3. Care less.
I think back to the things that kept me awake as a younger man—this conflict at work, that worry about money—and shake my head. Now when something is bothering me or threatens to stress me out, I ask myself whether the issue is likely to be bothering me in a week’s time. If the answer is no, I try to get a head start right then on not caring.

True to his craft as a satirist, Twain preferred to mock the whole business of elders dispensing counsel to youngsters, as he did in his 1882 essay “Advice to Youth”: “If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.”

I strongly suspect, however, that Twain followed better rules than this by the time he was 70. Closing his birthday remarks, the old riverboat pilot said that he had laid a course “toward the sinking sun with a contented heart”—no doubt by following the happy (if not quite so funny) principles above.

How to Be Happy Like Thomas Aquinas

2025-12-11T12:00:00-05:00

If you are a regular reader of this column or have studied the science of happiness elsewhere, you’ll know that getting happier requires three kinds of effort: using your intellect to understand your emotions and impulses, building conscious habits that create well-being, and sticking to these habits, notwithstanding your short-term urges. Another way of saying this is that you need to pay attention to your passions, intellect, and will.

That might seem a fairly modern insight, but it isn’t at all. Arguably, it was devised by the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274. Aquinas was a monk of the Dominican Order and a polymath who spread the works of Aristotle to medieval audiences. Aquinas was so prolific in his scholarship that he is said to have dictated multiple books simultaneously to his fellow monks. Among his many subjects was human happiness.

Aquinas wrote that “the final happiness of man does not consist in anything short of the contemplation of God”—a belief you might expect from a Catholic friar, that true and perfect contentment comes only when you die, go to heaven, and meet the creator. But Aquinas recognized that humans care about their life on Earth too, and he spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the “imperfect happiness” that we should strive for in the here and now. What he came up with—part of a body of insights known as Thomism—is as fresh and useful today as it was all those centuries ago. And this turns out to be all the more salient because his wisdom accords so well with modern science.

Aquinas had a monastic penchant for understatement. “In the present life,” he wrote, “we fall short of perfect happiness.” Latter-day researchers have verified this in many ways. Three scholars showed in 2015 that, on average, people judged their emotional state as positive 41 percent of the time, negative 16 percent of the time, and mixed 33 percent of the time (for the remaining 10 percent, their emotions could not be identified). Negative emotions, which militate against “perfect happiness,” are in fact perfectly normal and part of a healthy, functioning limbic system.

[Arthur C. Brooks: What monastic mystics got right about life]

The key to realizing greater happiness is not to try to eliminate one’s suffering but to manage it within reasonable levels and accentuate the many positive aspects of life. Aquinas devised a formula for achieving this, part of which includes “an operation of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions.” In everyday terms, that means developing a conscious understanding of what he called “appetitive” impulses: our animal urges and strong emotions.

Aquinas did not argue that these cravings and passions are bad. No gnostic or puritan, he believed that God created our passions. Rather, Aquinas suggested that we should govern our appetites instead of being governed by them. Doing so isn’t simple or easy, because we have powerful hedonic drives and potent feelings. But behavioral scientists have shown that simple conscious awareness and acknowledgment of these impulses can help with impulse control. This may make our short-term urges (smoking a cigarette, say) less likely to inhibit progress toward a long-term goal (achieving better health).

In other words, passions can benefit happiness as long as they are under the scrutiny of Aquinas’s second ingredient for earthly happiness: intellect. This is not simply a one-way relationship: When we use reason to manage our passions and cultivate them to accentuate their positive effect, they can stimulate the intellect as well. The process is interdependent, as Aquinas writes: “The operation of the intellect demands a previous operation of the senses.” Centuries later, this mechanism was found to be empirically true. In one 2025 study of Chinese and Iranian college students, positive emotions such as hope, pride, and enjoyment predicted greater academic engagement (measured by vigor, dedication, and absorption).

The relationship between passion and intellect involves being aware of one’s feelings and urges, and using that consciousness to decide to favor the positive, generative passions. This challenging course—take it from a former smoker—leads to the third element of Aquinas’s formula: will. This determination is the governing force that says: Choose this good thing that leads to what I want in the long run, not that bad thing that I crave in this instant. Our Dominican friend believed that humans are endowed by God with a “supernatural gift” to select what their intellect—properly directed by what Aquinas called “understanding”—has identified as the better option.

Whether willpower is supernatural or not, it can certainly be fostered and strengthened through practice, to enhance self-control. Social-science experiments show that when people strive to meet long-term goals, their willpower increases. In addition, people with greater willpower to get happier do, indeed, become happier. Not for nothing a professor at the University of Paris, Aquinas was spot on.

You might imagine that the professor was a bit of an elitist, what with his emphasis on intellect. But no, he defined intellect not as the capacity to ace the SATs but as the willingness and ability to contemplate and appreciate divine truth independently of our mortal brainpower. Aquinas thought that a person of any intelligence level could attain this kind of intellect.

Aquinas’s strategy for happiness on Earth—imperfect as that happiness may be—provides a remarkably clear blueprint for living, one that follows the best modern behavioral science. Here are three things to keep in mind as you adopt a Thomistic happiness strategy.

1. Knowledge is power.
Our modern world tends to valorize emotional spontaneity and authenticity, indulging our every limbic whim. Some people celebrate this, but it would have shocked Aquinas, who strongly advocated for temperance and modesty. He was not an advocate of being a repressed individual or maintaining a stiff-upper-lip approach to life, but he did believe in acquiring a serious self-understanding (what I have previously described as “metacognition”). Become a student of yourself: your habits, desires, drives, and emotional tendencies. Many meditation and prayer techniques help with this study of self, as does journaling and some forms of therapy. Know thyself well.

2. Not all passions are equal.
Once you know yourself or are getting to know yourself, you will find that some passions are morally and practically superior to others. You don’t want to become as coolly dispassionate as Mr. Spock on Star Trek; you want to be someone who is discriminating about their own tendencies, encouraging some and discouraging others. For example, you might see your natural curiosity and penchant for learning as something to be strongly encouraged to roam freely, whereas your urge to, say, shoplift might be something to try hard to avoid. Make an inventory of your passions, and decide which is which.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to stop self-obsessing and be happier]

3. Use your willpower for positive change.
The last step is to deploy your self-control strategically based on this inventory. Psychologists have demonstrated in experiments that willpower is like a muscle: Although it can be strengthened over time, in the short run, it can be easily depleted. So you need to spend your resources of willpower on the highest-priority targets. These should be your most positive and most negative passions, and you should aim to increase the former and avoid the latter.

For Aquinas, this strategy for imperfect happiness was not just theoretical. We all have our passions and impulses, and he himself was no exception. As a young man, he faced a true dilemma: whether to seek prestige or piety. The decision he made offers a master class in passion subordinated to the intellect and governed by the will.

The son of Count Landulf VI of Aquino, Aquinas grew up in the family’s castle in the Central Italian town of Roccasecca. As was the custom for younger sons of nobility, Aquinas was expected to enter the Benedictine order of monks, where he would follow his uncle’s example and become the abbot. As tempting as this highly prestigious post was, Aquinas elected instead to join the Dominicans, a recently created order of mendicant monks who were dedicated to poverty and itinerant preaching. His family was firmly against this choice and even imprisoned him for a year while they tried to talk him out of his folly and into accepting the illustrious position.

When Aquinas’s brothers tried to corrupt him by hiring a prostitute, he chased her out of the castle with a poker he seized from the fireplace. Firm in his intellectual conviction, Aquinas rallied his passions in service of the better choice. Eventually, the family relented and accepted his decision. By all accounts, the life of Aquinas was one of great imperfect happiness and, later, perhaps perfect happiness as well: After all, today he has been canonized as Saint Thomas Aquinas.

James Patterson’s Maxims for a Happy Life

2025-12-04T12:00:00-05:00

“When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1922. We have no idea how that project is going for the late British statesman, but we do know what he meant: Artistic creativity is a divine pursuit, and one of the great secrets to happiness.

I have believed this axiom from earliest childhood, thanks to afternoon hours blissfully spent painting with my mother (who was an artist). The belief persisted into later years, when I was playing music professionally through my 20s. And it remains true for me today, writing books and this column.

As a social scientist, I also have the evidence that creative pursuits are one of the best ways to boost well-being. Experiments find, for example, that expressive writing can raise life satisfaction, and painting may lower symptoms of depression and anxiety. Nearly half of Americans say that they use creativity to relieve stress. Given the solid research linking creativity and happiness, it stands to reason that advice for becoming more creative might function well as general guidance for well-being. After all, your life is itself a creative work in progress; treating it as such should make you happier.

To test out this idea, I asked an exceptionally creative person: the writer James Patterson, whom I recently interviewed for my weekly podcast. As prolific as he is popular, Patterson has, over the decades, published more than 200 books, which have sold in excess of 425 million copies; he also holds the Guinness World Record for most No. 1 New York Times best sellers (67). I wanted to ask what lessons in creativity he could offer, and how to sustain that literary drive year after year. And I wondered about the life lessons his artistic methods have taught him as well.

I reached Patterson at his home office in Florida, where he spends his time when he’s not in New York. He started out by very affably dismissing my entire project. “I never have advice for people,” he told me, but then went on: “I’m just going to tell you what I do, and you might find some of it useful.” Exactly what I wanted—which, of course, he knew.

I began by asking him about his early experiences as a professional writer—specifically, a murder mystery he wrote in 1976, at the age of 29. A smash hit, right? Wrong: The Thomas Berryman Number was rejected by 31 publishers. That’s a lot of rejection letters—but at least “some of them were pleasant,” he said. After finally finding a small publisher that accepted the book, it went on to win the prestigious Edgar Award for best first mystery in 1977, and it’s still selling today.

What did Patterson learn from this? If you are rejected, he told me, it doesn’t mean that you or your work is terrible.

Still, rejection is an inevitable part of the creative life, and it generally does not involve the subsequent vindication of a prestigious award. I asked him how to stay motivated and keep writing when the successes seem few and far between. His answer was, and still is, to focus on the books themselves, not on their reception—“to make them as good as I can,” he said, rather than worrying about whether they’re going to succeed.

Patterson had more to say about the process of writing. When he mentioned that Tom Wolfe was known for producing great first drafts, I asked what his own first drafts were like. “I think mostly crap,” he replied. But he did not mean this as modesty or self-denigration; he was making the point that a scrappy initial effort is the norm, and that for almost every creative writer, quality and success depend not on writing, but on rewriting.

Writing and rewriting more than 200 books takes some serious grit, and no small amount of inspiration. I wondered how Patterson endlessly comes up with ideas for compelling stories. “I’ll see some little scene in a movie,” he told me, or “somebody in the street. It’s just little things.” The key lies not in epic adventures or outlandish yarns, but in simply taking extraordinary interest in ordinary things.

I sensed that this wisdom of the ordinary might have been gained with age and experience, so I wondered what else had changed over five decades of work (a favorite topic of mine). Without hesitation, he said that his focus and concentration have suffered—but, now in his 70s, he feels that he has become stronger at character development and stylistic quality, as well as at collaboration with others. This is consistent with a distinction, made by psychologists, between two types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. The former is highest in early adulthood; the latter takes precedence in later years.

I wondered whether this shift had left Patterson with any feeling of things undone. “I don’t look back too much,” he told me. “I’m not a big regrets person.” If he notices something in his earlier work that he could have done better, he tries “not to ruin the day with it.” He has a phrase to sum up this philosophy: “It’s biscuits.” Meaning? The biscuits are made. Butter ’em, eat ’em, and move on.

I hope the whole interview is worth listening to, but the points I’ve highlighted here imply not just a philosophy of creative writing, but a way of living happily: what I’ll call Patterson’s Maxims for a Happy Life.

1. Be confident, but be humble.
If you are rejected, it doesn’t mean you or your work are terrible. On the flip side, if you are celebrated, it doesn’t mean you and your work are wonderful. To accept this is to benefit from what psychologists have called “quiet ego,” which I’ve written about in the past. The research is clear that the quiet ego’s combination of traits predicts resilience and well-being, because confidence allows a person to act without too much fear, while humility keeps them from becoming unbearable when things go well.

2. Pay attention to process rather than outcomes.
We all have life goals, things we’d like to achieve, but we all experience some outcomes we want and others we do not. To live in equanimity, however, is to focus most of the time on doing things well in the present. So if, say, you want your kids to turn out well, the best parenting strategy is to turn your attention to what you should do right now with your child that will be conducive to that outcome.

3. Excellence is less about talent and inspiration, more about hard work and persistence.
What sets successful people apart is generally not just natural talent but what the psychologist Angela Duckworth calls “grit,” the quality of character that combines desire and perseverance. And anyone can acquire more grit, enhancing their likelihood of success, by focusing on six factors that Patterson clearly practices in his writing: hope, effort, precision, passion, ritual, and prioritization.

4. To find the most meaning, look for a life more ordinary.
To feel significance, you might think that you should frequently seek novel experiences outside your usual routine. But scholars find that everyday habits give people a sense of meaning as well. This is especially true as we get older: Researchers have shown that as people age, they are more likely to associate life’s regular experiences—a simple dinner with friends, a walk in the park or on the beach—with happiness.

5. Focus on what’s getting better, rather than fretting over what’s getting worse.
Early in life, you will probably have strong focus and innovative ability. As these wane, you will find new capacities in, say, vocabulary and general knowledge. Knowing the difference—and playing to your strengths at different times of life—leads to a happier existence.

6. It’s biscuits.
Being cognizant of past missteps is certainly wise, to help you learn and grow as a person. But ruminating on the past, especially on an episode you perceive as an error or a cause for grievance, is strongly associated with negative emotions. Sound evidence backs the idea that learning to live more mindfully in the present can help you feel more biscuits about your past—and, as Patterson says, “move on” more happily.

Reflecting on the conversation, I had one lingering question: How normal is Patterson? As writers and artists go, I mean. He is a remarkably upbeat person—in an occupation known for a high incidence of depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders. Many celebrated creative people have testified to the agonies of life in the arts. George Orwell said that “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” But how does Patterson find the work of writing? “I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it.”

This brought me back to my original thesis—about the association that researchers have found between creative pursuits and happiness. For a very famous writer, Patterson may be quite abnormal in his contentment. But the fact that the creative work of writing makes him so happy could mean that he’s an inspiringly normal example for the rest of us.

The Right Attitude to Gratitude

2025-11-27T08:00:00-05:00

Have you ever reflected on what an ungrateful wretch you are? Instead of being thankful that a delicious beverage awaits at your favorite coffee shop, you fume because the person ahead in line ordered a caramel macchiato frappe oatmeal horchata with a splash of macadamia milk, and is now paying for it in nickels.

Your ingratitude is not your fault; it’s probably evolution’s. You have a negativity bias passed on from your ancestors. They needed to operate with a bias that made negative emotions win out over positive ones, because—as unpleasant as negative emotions are—they are more likely to save your life in the presence of a genuine threat. In our day and age, this proclivity tends to be maladapted in ways that make you disproportionately attuned to insignificant hazards and insensitive to the many delights and blessings around you. That, of course, makes you unhappy.

So think of Thanksgiving not as a holiday, but as an intervention. You can make the occasion a manual override to your naturally ungrateful disposition. But you don’t have to restrict this intervention to a once-yearly deployment. With a little knowledge and practice of some specific techniques, you can grow the amount of gratitude in your emotional repertoire and get a lot happier year-round.

When I’ve previously written about the benefits of gratitude for happiness, I have presented the great body of evidence that shows how expressing authentic thankfulness raises the well-being not only of the person being thanked but also of the person doing the thanking (and perhaps to an even higher degree). Gratitude interrupts cycles of negative rumination by reminding you of the good things in your life, which helps lower depressive symptoms as well as reduce stress and negative emotions, such as anxiety. Feeling grateful pulls your attention away from what you lack and toward what you have, and this is associated with a decrease in envy and materialism. Gratitude has also been found to improve romantic relationships and lower burnout at work.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Four ways to be grateful—and happier]

Gratitude is so effective that if you could bottle it, you’d be a billionaire. But as with so many beautiful parts of life, gratitude is not something you can market like a drug or nutritional supplement: It happens to be completely free—but not so easy to attain. Thankfulness requires neither payment nor subscription, just a commitment to stand up against your limbic system, which is lying to you with its negativity bias—saying that this lovely morning is actually pretty annoying, and that everyone is dissing you.

Researchers on gratitude have tested different interventions to override our negative nature. The first comes from the work of the psychologists Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, who introduced “gratitude lists” in experiments two decades ago. They found that simply listing what you’re grateful for each week, and then looking at the list every day, would, on average, raise your mood over nine weeks by 6 percent against a control group that recorded neutral things (such as current events), and by 12 percent against a group that noted down life’s hassles (what we normally tend to do).

A second intervention, devised by the psychologist Martin Seligman, involves writing letters of gratitude to others, telling the recipient in each case specifically what you’re thankful to them for. Seligman shows that the happiness effects this affords the thanker persist for a long time—even until a six-month follow-up by the researchers—probably because of an enhanced relationship with the person receiving the letter. The effect on the person being thanked is also profound, and this holds even when the person knows you’re writing a thank-you letter not spontaneously but as a deliberate happiness practice. Seligman, who is a longtime mentor of mine, and someone whom I greatly admire, last year wrote me an email of appreciation himself, totally unbidden. That made my month.

A third intervention is similar to the second but involves outward, public action. In 2023, four researchers looked at the well-being effects of using social media to express gratitude to someone. Although this practice is less intimate, and therefore leads to a lower sense of connection with the person than if you express gratitude through a private channel, the scholars found that a public thanking confers approximately the same boost in life satisfaction and moral elevation as the private thanks does.

Finally, psychologists have studied a fourth, simple intervention of “grateful contemplation,” in which people are induced to think briefly about a few things they’re grateful for. In experiments with college students who practice this for just a few minutes, the researchers found that the participants experienced an immediate drop in negative mood. By thinking of things they were thankful to have done over the past summer, for example, they successfully shifted their attention away from feelings of regret or envy over the things they wished they’d done.

All told, you have a lot of means to make gratitude boost your well-being. I recommend that you adopt a protocol that uses the best aspects of all these interventions.

1. Weekly treatment
Each week at the same time, write down five things for which you’re particularly grateful. Post the list in a place where you will see it every day, such as on the fridge or your laptop. Each morning until the next week’s list, pause to savor each item of thankfulness for 30 seconds.

Then also, at another point in the week from your list-making, start the day by writing one text or email of appreciation to someone in your life. The message doesn’t have to be long or ornate, just a few sentences to say you are thankful. And be specific about why. The recipient can be a loved one, a colleague, even a stranger—such as someone whose work you admire—who has a public address.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

2. Opportunistic public action
If you use social media or have another type of platform, use it to show gratitude or admiration when a reason to do so occurs to you. Maybe the person you’re thanking is well known, maybe they’re completely unknown. Their profile isn’t the point; the idea is to tell your followers or audience that someone specific has affected your life in a positive way.

3. Authenticity check
Random acts of thanking can be great, but take care: Trying to look grateful is not the same as expressing authentic gratitude. If you thank someone solely to attain a desirable social outcome, people can tell; you might come off looking like a suck-up. Worst of all, the well-being effect will be blunted.

You may have noticed that I didn’t include grateful contemplation in my protocol above. That’s because I keep it in my back pocket all the time, and pull it out as needed. I try to have a running list of things to be thankful for, to rescue myself when I’m feeling especially negative. For example, I am writing these words on an annoyingly delayed flight, while sitting behind someone who reclined his seat all the way back into my personal space approximately one second after takeoff. I could ruminate on these inconveniences, making minor resentments seem larger. Or I could think about the fact that you actually wanted to read this column about gratitude and might benefit from it.

I chose the latter. This changed my mood very quickly. Thank you. And happy Thanksgiving.

To Get Happier, Make Yourself Smaller

2025-11-20T12:00:00-05:00

Early in my academic career, I noticed that one of the most popular classes on campus was Introduction to Astronomy, a general-science course that anyone could take. The students all loved it—especially the non-science majors. I asked one of them, an economics student, why she enjoyed astronomy so much. She didn’t say anything about stars, but she did say something powerful about earthly existence. “When I go into class on Thursday mornings, I usually am stressed out about my life,” she told me. “But 90 minutes later, I feel relief because I am just a speck on a speck.”

She was expressing a profound philosophical truth. We tend to believe that to be happier, we need to become bigger in our own mind, and in the minds of others. But that’s wrong. What we really need to achieve both the perspective on life we need and the peace we crave is to get smaller in relation to everything and everyone else. When we experience our own littleness, we stop blocking our ability to see our life in just proportion. We can relax into a humble reality of not being the object of attention and criticism, and we can appreciate a magnificent universe without spoiling it with our self-absorption and petty concerns.

Unless you suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder, you know that, being completely honest with yourself, you are not the center of most things in life. Virtually all of the time, other people are thinking about themselves, not you, and the world would continue with little disruption if you weren’t here at all. It is very possible that even your own great-grandchildren will not know your name. And yet, when you aren’t making a conscious effort to recognize these truths, you go about your business with the illusion that you are, in fact, the focus of intense outside interest.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The key to critical self-awareness]

People care what you think and do, you believe—after all, they judge you all day long, both positively and negatively. Or so you think. This self-aggrandizing fantasy is almost certainly a product of evolution: By thinking that they mattered more as individuals than they actually did, your ancestors strove to rise in social hierarchies. This work of constantly comparing themselves with others made it more likely that they would pass on their genes in a competitive mating environment. You inherited their delusions of grandeur.

But this comes at a cost: Thinking about yourself all the time makes you miserable over the long term. Researchers have shown that such self-focus can provoke emotional problems, making social situations or task performance feel frightening and unpleasant. Self-focus is especially deleterious for people who by nature have high social anxiety: Neuroscientists have observed hyperactivation of brain structures associated with anxiety when these people are instructed to think about themselves. An additional downside is that self-focus makes performing skilled tasks less enjoyable. In a study of basketball players published in 2002, sports psychologists instructed one group of players to focus on their own performance during warm-up. These players experienced higher anxiety than others who were not given this instruction.

And the reward? Even success in hierarchy-climbing is costly. Primate researchers studying wild baboons have shown that the highest-ranking males have greater testosterone levels than lower-ranking males, but they also have raised glucocorticoid levels, indicating constant elevated levels of stress. In humans, stress-hormone levels fall among those high in status only when their position is stable. Personally, I know no one who has made their way to the top who feels the slightest bit secure about their position.

All of this might strike you as strange. Mother Nature tells you to do something that makes you miserable. And the more miserable you get, the more you do it. But Mother Nature simply doesn’t care whether you’re happy. She just wants you to ascend the hierarchy and pass on your genes. Happiness is your problem, not hers.

As I have shown in the past, getting happier very often requires you to resist your natural tendencies, not give in to them. The world is constantly inviting you to try to make yourself appear bigger in others’ eyes and in your own; this fact underpins the entire social-media business model. The trick to finding happiness is to get smaller. Here are three ways you can achieve that.

1. Stand in awe.
I have previously cited the work of the UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner about the importance for happiness of standing in awe, which he defines as the “feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” The reason that awe raises happiness is that it makes you smaller—exactly the feeling that the econ student was expressing about her astronomy class. But there are ways to experience awe besides looking at the night sky through a telescope. Keltner recommends spending time in nature, enjoying great music and art, and witnessing acts of moral beauty. Find what leaves you speechless and transfixed, and you will understand.

2. Seek the divine.
A common theme in most major religions involves the loss of self through communion with the divine. In Sufism, this is called fanā’, or “the annihilation of the ego.” The 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi wrote about fanā’ in exquisite metaphors; in this poem, he compared his self to a “clear bead”:

There are no edges to my loving now.
The clear bead at the center
changes everything.

Modern neuroscience has revealed how this works. With colleagues, Columbia University’s Lisa Miller has shown that recalling spiritual experiences lowers activity in the medial thalamus and the caudate, brain regions that control sensory and emotional processing; this allows us to transcend our ordinary concerns and focus on deeper questions than how many people liked your latest social-media post.

[Peter Wehner: Awe is essential]

3. Quietly serve others.
Virtually all of the many experiments on charitable behavior show that giving raises well-being—especially when it is anonymous, with no spotlight on your virtuous acts. One 2020 study demonstrated this in a novel way by studying anonymous kidney donors. The 114 donors were, on average, significantly happier than the general population after their donation to a stranger. You don’t have to give away an organ to benefit from this effect—just give more of yourself, without expectation of acknowledgment or reward. That way, you are truly transcending yourself.

This evidence for the happiness-enhancing power of self-abnegation might seem like a repudiation of what we have heard for decades about the importance of self-esteem. At one level, this is true insofar as high self-esteem leads to pleasant feelings in the short term. But working this psychological lever is not especially helpful for a good and satisfying life over time, and indeed it can lead to narcissism, by returning us to the delusion of our own importance and the constant need to maintain a mirage that we are at the center of everything. The opposite approach—finding peace and perspective in smallness—is the lasting way to well-being.

So relax into the reality of your cosmic smallness. The plain truth is that you are a speck on a speck. But you’re a lovely little speck, and beloved by a few other specks. That’s a good life.

An Evening Ritual to Realize a Happier Life

2025-11-13T12:00:00-05:00

In September, I published a column that laid out the design of my morning protocol, which uses the best available research to manage my mood—especially my natural negativity—and optimize my creativity and productivity. The six steps I detailed there have dramatically enhanced my quality of life. Since that column, many readers have inquired about how to design other parts of the day, particularly the evening. This column outlines the evening protocol I have developed to match my morning one.

Its goal is different. I want to start the day in a way that regulates, in a downward direction, my negative affect and regulates upward the energy and focus I need to write and teach effectively. In contrast, the architecture of the evening protocol aims to create a calm, positive mood and prepare me for sleep.

Achieving that is especially challenging for me because I am by nature a poor sleeper and because I need to travel almost every week, changing time zones frequently and sleeping in strange places by myself, as opposed to in my own bed, together with my wife, at a time of my choosing. For that reason, this protocol is the ideal, rather than my norm. Even so, this research-based plan has helped me a great deal—and it might provide a starting point for you to create your own.

[From the August 2025 issue: Why can’t Americans sleep?]

1. Eat your last meal in good time.
The end of the day starts at dinner, which in my home is generally at 6 p.m. This might seem absurdly early to you, as it initially did to my Spanish wife when we immigrated to the United States together three decades ago. But this timing is important because the research is clear: Eating too close to bedtime negatively affects sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) and quality. Alcohol tends to have a negative impact on sleep quality, and caffeine is a no-no any time late in the day. Unfortunately for me—my sweet tooth is the reason I most often fail in my protocol—skipping dessert is a good idea because sugar makes it harder to wind down.

2. Walk it off.
When I am at home, my wife and I take a walk right after dinner, usually for about 40 minutes. A stroll is especially beneficial if the sun sets while we’re out, because this enhances the body’s circadian rhythms. I do not count this walk as my daily exercise, which I do first thing in the morning, but the mild exertion is still excellent for physical and mental health. (In fact, some evidence suggests that strenuous evening exercise can disrupt sleep.) Walking is especially beneficial after eating, because it lowers hyperglycemia (a glucose spike) by about 14 percent. Hyperglycemia impairs mood in some people, so in addition to other health benefits, walking can improve one’s emotional state.

Holding hands while walking with your partner can be a nice extra. My wife and I always make a point of doing so, even though our children tease us for being “like kids” despite our 34 years of marriage. There’s actual solid science for why hand-holding is healthy: By measuring pupil dilation (which indicates activity in the autonomic nervous system), scholars in Utah showed in 2019 that holding hands can buffer stress levels.

3. Take your vitamins.
A good deal of recent research has looked into how supplements can aid evening mood management and sleep. There is no silver bullet for insomnia, as I can attest—I have tried absolutely everything over the years. My grizzled endocrine system laughs in the face of chamomile tea and other folk remedies. And if a pill from the doctor really knocks you out, then in my experience, it is probably an addictive and dangerous drug. A number of over-the-counter dietary supplements may, however, offer help. Probably the most effective is magnesium; less supported by research but worth trying are zinc, vitamin D, and L-theanine. Many people swear by melatonin supplements, which are generally regarded as safe—but take note that, as the nutritional expert and longevity specialist Peter Attia has advised, their dosage may be too high. In general, it is a good idea to consult your primary-care physician about any supplement you’re considering.

4. Leave the phone outside the bedroom.
Without doubt, the most obvious but least observed part of this protocol is to put your phone away at least an hour before turning in, and not to check it until morning. A huge amount of research has shown that smartphone use wrecks sleep quality. The blue light that your device emits suppresses the body’s natural melatonin production in the pineal gland and disrupts circadian rhythms, which means that even if you do fall asleep while scrolling, your slumber will be choppy and not restful. Smartphone use also interferes with Steps 6 and 7 of the protocol—so just don’t! And not even on the nightstand: I plug my phone into an outlet inside a closet on a different floor from my bedroom; it might as well be in a locked box.

5. Go to bed already!
My morning protocol recommended a very early start to the day, to optimize both productivity and happiness. To manage this and still get enough sleep requires hitting the sack at a reasonable hour. People need different amounts of sleep (your number might be different from mine), but you are unlikely to be well rested with fewer than 6.5 hours. When I am not traveling or doing an evening speaking event, I try to go to bed at 9 p.m. The best conditions for the bedroom are simple: cool and completely dark.

6. Lock eyes with your partner.
This step assumes you are sleeping with a spouse or partner—then again, if you have a dog, it might still work. You’ll likely know about the crucial role that oxytocin plays in social and romantic bonding; it also has benefits for calmness and relaxation. This neuropeptide makes your bond with your partner feel unique, profound, maybe even divine. One of the best ways to stimulate oxytocin release is sustained eye contact in conversation, something that many couples neglect. You may have found, as I have, that making a conscious effort to hold eye contact when talking to someone can be a relationship game changer. What works for fostering understanding and trust among colleagues at work is even more important for maintaining intimacy and connection with your partner. At bedtime, reserve a few minutes before lights out to discuss what went right during the day, making full eye contact. For extra effect, hold hands at the same time.

7. Read (or be read to).
Many people read in bed. This is great not just for sleeping—providing it is from a book, not a device—but also for the learning and recall of the ideas that you absorb just before drifting off. Reading aloud to others, and being read to, are particularly beneficial. As one 2024 study on college students showed, auditory “reading”—listening to an audiobook, for example—improves sleep quality even more than reading a physical book. I have not seen any studies that measured the specific effects of reading to your beloved or being read to by them—but, in my own informal nighttime research, I have found clear evidence that the effect of listening to love poetry or the Psalms delivered with a feminine Spanish accent is equivalent to clinical-grade narcotics.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Sleep more and be happier]

8. The last words at night.
As a child, you probably got the advice that when you couldn’t sleep, you should try counting sheep or simply counting backwards from 100. This is fine, if boring, but you can do better by having a silent, self-soothing routine that tells your brain, You are going to sleep now, and happily. Researchers studying Muslim populations, for example, have found that the practice of reciting prayers at night leads to the release of natural melatonin. Many people of all religions use a simple prayer that silently accompanies them for their passage into slumber each night; typically, these follow the cadence of slow, steady breathing. Personally, I like to use the mantra-like “Jesus Prayer,” which is a common practice among Russian Orthodox monks. For nonreligious people, the silent repetition of a simple affirmation—such as, “I am grateful for this day, and finish it in peace”—can be synchronized with your breathing, so that the first phrase accompanies the inhalation, the second phrase your exhalation.

I would offer one last rule, though it might seem paradoxical. The goal of an evening protocol is calm, positive affect and restful sleep. But this protocol can all too easily turn into rigid dogma, from which any deviation or failure to uphold itself causes stress—and that defeats the whole purpose. Instead, what you need is what psychologists refer to as a “state of surrender ”—the willingness to accept what is, without resistance. So the ninth, and last, step is this:

9. Never mind.
Maybe observing the protocol is impossible today because of circumstances beyond your control. Or maybe you’ve followed the protocol closely but you still can’t sleep. Getting uptight about either scenario is contrary to the spirit of the exercise. Rather, just say, “This is as it should be. I accept it.”

Goodnight.

Three Rules for a Lasting Happy Marriage

2025-11-06T12:00:00-05:00

One of the Beatles’ most beloved songs is “When I’m Sixty-Four,” the second track on Side 2 of their groundbreaking 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It features a 24-year-old Paul McCartney singing to his lover, asking whether she will still love him in the distant future, when he is a hopelessly ancient and decrepit 64-year-old.

When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

This humorous, slightly schmaltzy ditty nonetheless poses a profound question for every long-term couple: Will you, in fact, find me attractive when we’re old? I had this very question in mind recently, as I contemplated the 34th anniversary of my own wedding. My wife wondered the same thing.

Neither of us is quite 64 yet (getting close), but I’m confident the answer for us both will turn out to be yes—though not for the things that attracted us to each other when we married, at 27. What keeps people in love is not what makes them fall in love in the first place. Understanding this might just keep your partnership intact until you are 64—and beyond.

The notion that romantic attraction is purely a function of social and cultural forces is a common assumption. These factors do matter, but evidence from psychology and biology suggests that our amorous impulses owe more to nature than to nurture. One expert on the matter is David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas. In his influential 1994 book, The Evolution of Desire, based on his study of some 10,000 people from cultures all over the world, Buss reported that, initially at least, heterosexual males are most attracted to fertility cues in females (attractiveness, health, youth), whereas females are attracted to resource cues (status, ambition, wealth).

[Joe Scarborough: How Paul McCartney ran to the top]

Buss does not assert that these are the only traits that matter to men and women. Both sexes want someone who is kind, honest, and respectful. In other ways, people’s preferences vary a lot. But the general pattern is clear, as most people have probably experienced and would confirm, and this finding has been replicated many times by other researchers. For example, as an international team of academic researchers reported in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior in 2018, when men and women were shown photos of the opposite sex alongside information about their earning status, “ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females.”

When my wife and I met, I had approximately zero dollars in my bank account and, working as a musician, was barely making rent. Presented with the evidence above, my wife concluded that she must be an evolutionary outlier. Not so, it turns out. Researchers in 2017 found that women also regard high creativity in men as attractive, perhaps because this acts as a cue for intelligence and, therefore, future resources. Apparently, playing the French horn well can stimulate a prospective mate’s limbic system to sense that someone might have a path to good repute and financial stability.

Once a couple is past the early stages of romance, however, attraction starts to change. For example, writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2008, five researchers found evidence that once men are “restricted”—that is, in a committed relationship—they show a significantly weaker preference for lower body-mass index and lower waist-to-hip ratios in women (which are both common fertility cues). Similarly, researchers writing in 2021 showed that, with the passage of time, the physical attractiveness of mates becomes less important to men. This study noted that what does become more important over time, for both sexes, are two personality traits: openness and mutual trust.

Many other studies show the same pattern. For example, Buss notes that long-standing couples place a growing value on loyalty and dependability. Personality matters, too: In 2020, researchers who followed 87 couples who’d been married for at least 15 years (many of them for much longer, in fact) found that the success of their partnership was largely thanks to developing a high degree of positive emotional behavior. Humor, enthusiasm, and validation—understanding and accepting each other’s feelings and perspectives—were especially important. Another experiment, which studied the marital success of child-rearing couples over the first six years of marriage, demonstrated that the couples happiest over time have a high level of fondness and admiration for each other.

I’d add one other factor, too: the spiritual dimension. As I have written previously, research has found that couples of faith are happier if they grow more religious over the years and practice together. What’s good for your soul is also good for your marriage, it turns out.

None of this is to say that by the time they’ve reached their mid-60s, spouses don’t care anymore about good looks or abundant resources. On the contrary, we all like an attractive spouse, as well as someone who can support the family. As Buss notes in his work, these are the qualities that people will flaunt at all ages if they find themselves unexpectedly single or are seeking to switch mates. But in general, if you’re hoping for a lifelong union, you’d be making a mistake trying to keep your mate by offering only what attracted them in the first place. In a long-term partnership with one person that sustains companionate love, you should shift your effort toward nurturing qualities in yourself that are less superficial than looks or money. Here are three evidence-based rules to keep in mind.

1. Slap on the cuffs.
When I married in Spain, where I was working in an orchestra, I remember the advice I received from one of my colleagues to think carefully before my wedding, because the Spanish word for “wives” is the same as that for “handcuffs” (esposas). That seemed like a pretty dumb joke to me at the time; Spanish humor can be a bit on the nose for my taste. But since then, I’ve thought about that double meaning with more fondness: Far from being shackled, you can cultivate dependability and complete loyalty. This fosters a happy feeling of being almost physically attached to each other, in a way that endures.

2. Stay positive.
A toxic habit that plagues many marriages is bringing all of one’s negative emotions home because that is where it feels safe to express them. The result is that partners impose a deep negative burden on the one relationship that should bring them the most joy. The research findings cited above clearly show that a strong long-term pair bond relies on abundant positive emotionality, whereas negativity weakens it. Being positive does not occur spontaneously: You must resolve to bring your happiness home, not just your unhappiness, and endeavor to share it.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be happy growing older]

3. Grow in spirit—together.
Many long-term couples with a spiritual or religious bent describe their partnership as something like an antenna that makes them more receptive to the supernatural, an effect that becomes more powerful over time. For example, aging Hindu couples sometimes practice vanaprastha, the third of life’s four stages according to Hinduism, in which one focuses less on worldly things and more on theology by sharing in charitable activities, spiritual study, and pilgrimages. I obviously can’t verify by scientific means whether this connection to the divine is real, but a lot of research suggests that prayer and worship with another person can increase the emotional resonance of the practice and deepen the trust that a couple has in each other. For nonreligious couples, some research has also shown an increase in closeness when practicing certain kinds of meditation together.

Life provides no guarantees, including guarantees about love. People may change and plenty of disappointments can occur, including in relationships. But you and your beloved can do a great deal to tilt the odds in your favor that when you each turn 64, you’re still together and in love.

This starts by understanding that neither your physical beauty nor your worldly ambition is most important over the long haul. What truly matters is your virtue, your heart, your character, and your soul—all dedicated to your true love and expressed in both the big and the little things of life. McCartney seemed to sense this truth even as a young man. As he imagined a happy old age lived together, he wrote:

I could be handy, mending a fuse,
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside,
Sunday mornings, go for a ride.

Maybe that sort of companionship sounds tame and dull when you’re a hot, hard-charging 24-year-old. But trust me and Mrs. Brooks, as we mark our 34th wedding anniversary: It’s great.

Why You Should Keep an Open Mind on the Divine

2025-10-30T12:00:00-04:00

I grew up in Seattle in the 1970s, long before it became the tech-and-hipster boomtown it is today. Our city’s only real claim to fame in those days was the Space Needle, a 605-foot observation tower that had a revolving restaurant at the top and that had been built for the 1962 World’s Fair. The tower got its name from the fair’s theme: “Living in the Space Age.”

One of the most prominent visitors of the World’s Fair was the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth. Asked by a reporter about his experience in space, his response made headlines. “Sometimes people are saying that God is out there,” Titov said. “I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God.”

This was, of course, a way for Titov to promote his government’s official atheist position inside America—a little jab at the Soviet Union’s primitively religious Cold War foe. But it was of a piece with a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don’t observe something and can’t physically find it, then it is fair to assume it doesn’t exist. If you insist on that thing’s existence because you feel it, believe in it, or have faith in it, you are deluded or a fool.

[Listen: Can religion make you happy?]

No matter your stance on religion, the Titovian philosophy is a foolish position. Indeed, life is incomplete and nonsensical without a belief in the reality of the unseen.

It might strike you as unscientific to believe in the unseen, but the truth is the opposite: A good deal of the way today’s scientists understand the world operates at a purely theoretical level. Take modern physics: For many decades, particle physicists have studied the building blocks of matter—the atoms that make up molecules; the protons and neutrons inside atoms; the quarks that make up protons and neutrons. Quarks are so small that they cannot be observed at any visual scale; they are understood to be pointlike entities that have zero dimensionality. And yet, no physicist believes quarks don’t exist, because the theoretical and indirect empirical evidence that they do is overwhelming.

Although some components of the material world are too small to see, the existence of such facets of reality beyond human perception enjoys widespread and uncontroversial belief. Multivariate calculus, for example, is a rudimentary mathematical tool commonly learned at school that can solve real-life problems such as how to optimize the schedules of, say, five people at once. Yet when it involves more than three variables, calculus is operating in a dimensionality that cannot be depicted graphically in any conventional way. This makes scientific sense, too, because neuroscientists have shown that we can think in dimensions higher than those we can actually see. That itself constitutes a belief in an unseen—indeed, unseeable—reality.

Beyond the abstract realms of mathematics and physics, the natural sciences (such as zoology and biology) offer similar proofs. We know for a fact that senses beyond the five that humans possess exist for other species. Sharks have specialized sensory organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which give them electroreception, the ability to detect electrical fields generated by the muscular and neural activity of other living organisms. Jewel beetles have infrared organs that register the radiation emitted by fires. Many snakes have a sense similar to infrared vision, which enables them to perceive a thermal image of potential prey.

Humans lack these senses, but to assume they don’t exist would be silly, even dangerous. Similarly, we have no reason to believe that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware—and which are as yet undiscovered.

All of this scientific knowledge would have been dismissed in the past as crazy fiction, primitive superstition, possibly even a sign of demonic possession. This fact should instill in us some humility about ideas outside current scientific understanding that concern things we can’t see but that others perceive as real and claim indirect evidence for.

Take, for example, this definition of faith in the existence of God, from the Bible: “the assurance of what we hope for and the conviction about things that cannot be seen.” This is a belief held not only by the unschooled, but by many of history’s most esteemed scholars and thinkers. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle made the case for the existence of God as the unseen “first mover,” the necessarily uncaused, prior cause of all other things. More than 1,400 years after Aristotle, the medieval Muslim scientist and philosopher Ibn Rushd (known in the Western world as Averroes) defended the Greek philosopher and refuted the argument, common then and today, that the visible presence of evil proves the nonexistence of God. “What happens contrary to providence is due to the necessity of matter,” he argued, “not to the shortcomings of the creator.”

This can’t simply be dismissed as premodern thinking. In a 2009 survey, the Pew Research Center found that among scientists who belonged to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, just over half (51 percent) believed in “some form of deity or higher power.” Defying the general trend that young adults are becoming less religious than their elders, scientists under 35, who have grown up amid the latest breakthroughs, were the most religious in the survey: 66 percent were believers, as opposed to 46 percent of scientists 65 and older.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to make life more transcendent]

Some modern scholars have gone so far as to try to blend the science of the unseen with the realm of the supernatural. Robert J. Marks, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University, suggests that God (the Christian God, in this case) exists in higher dimensions than we can see, making him real in our lives but completely invisible to our physical senses. An alternative proposition, advanced by three Harvard cognitive-science researchers, is that God is perceptible only to human intuition—a sixth sense, in effect.

We cannot expect ever to settle the argument over the existence of God. Just as we should continue to question theories, hypotheses, and assumptions in every field of science, we should interrogate religious and philosophical beliefs. By the same token, however, we should also exercise skepticism about our unbeliefs based on what we cannot perceive directly. To dismiss something for the fact of its invisibility is a mistake. Instead, intellectual integrity should make us open to indirect evidence that comes from beyond the realm of ordinary observation.

I learned that viewpoint, in fact, from someone who lived only a couple of miles from the Space Needle: my father. A brilliant mathematician and statistician, as well as a lifelong but not uncritical Christian believer, he pondered the vexing questions of evil and randomness his whole life. He embodied for me someone whose intellectual openness also involved religious activity in the form of daily prayer, contemplation, service, and worship. He died many years ago, so I can’t check this, but I have a dim memory of him weighing in on Titov’s argument about not finding God in space. “It’s like saying Picasso doesn’t exist because he can’t be found inside Picasso’s paintings.” Amen.

What True Wealth Looks Like

2025-10-23T12:00:00-04:00

Many stressed-out people are attracted to eastern meditation, believing that it will give them relief from their “monkey mind” and lower their anxiety about life. Unfortunately, the monkey usually wins because people find the mental focus required for meditation devilishly hard. On a trip last year to India, I asked a Buddhist teacher why Westerners struggle so much with the practice. “You won’t get the benefit from meditation,” he said, “as long as you are meditating to get the benefit.”

You might call this the “meditation paradox,” and it seemed like the most Buddhist thing I had ever heard. But when I thought about it more, I realized that the teacher’s epigram held a deep truth about a lot of life’s rewards: You can only truly attain them when you are not seeking them.

Consider the relationship between money and happiness, about which you’ve no doubt received mixed messages your whole life. On the one hand, your grandmother probably taught you that money can’t buy happiness. On the other, today’s dominant culture insists that it can.

[Michael Mechanic: Stop asking whether money buys happiness]

So who’s right: grandma or the zeitgeist? The meditation paradox provides the answer: both. Money can buy happiness—as long as you don’t try to buy happiness.

Social scientists have long studied whether money raises well-being. The conventional answer from economists is yes, at least up to a point. The most famous study supporting this came in 2010 from two Nobel laureates who calculated that various measures of life satisfaction increase with a person’s income up to about $75,000 ($112,000 in today’s dollars), at which point very little benefit is derived from extra money. Since then, this finding has been partly contested by scholars such as Matthew A. Killingsworth, who showed in an excellent study using a much larger data set that the happiness plateau generally occurs at a higher income level.

According to psychologists, the answer to the money and well-being question is a bit different: The cash-happiness quotient depends more on the type of relationship you have with money than the actual amount of money you have. Researchers writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2014 demonstrated this mechanism by looking at materialism, defined as “values, goals, and associated beliefs that center on the importance of acquiring money and possessions that convey status.” Analyzing 259 data sets on the subject, they found that materialistic values are negatively correlated with overall life satisfaction, mood, self-appraisal, and physical health. Instead, these values were positively associated with depression, anxiety, compulsive buying, and risky behaviors. That’s what your grandma was talking about.

We can be even more precise when we look specifically at the reasons people give for why they earn their money. According to a 2001 article in the same journal, psychologists found no negative association between well-being and acquiring money for the fundamental purposes of security or supporting your family. The problem comes from wanting to earn money for four particular motives: making social comparisons, seeking power, showing off, and overcoming self-doubt. Put simply, if you are striving to get rich to feel superior to others, or because you’re trying to boost your self-worth, your efforts will lower your happiness.

These findings reinforce what I have written about in the past: that your well-being depends on how you spend your money. Buying possessions generally does not increase happiness, whereas spending money either on experiences enjoyed with loved ones or to get more free time does reliably raise well-being. This makes intuitive sense about the type of person who will get a flashy watch or a fast car to make their point, rather than rent a nice place to spend a quiet week away with their soulmate.

So the research suggests that money follows a version of the meditation paradox: It’s good for your well-being as long as you don’t seek money because you believe wealth will enhance your well-being. This in turn suggests three positive changes that you can make.

1. Interrogate your financial motives.
If this essay has alerted you to the fact that your motives for earning money matter for your happiness—and that making a lot of money is important to you—you may be asking yourself why. Take some time to consider what images enter your mind when you imagine reaching your financial goals. Do you see yourself being admired or envied by others? Do you feel as though you’ve made it, and are finally worthy of approval? These images might reflect your motivations, but they are terrible for your well-being. (Another point to bear in mind: If your financial motives are indeed social comparison and self-worth, you will never reach your financial goals, because you will never have enough money to satisfy these needs.) Simply recognizing your true motives and choosing better ones—such as “I earn money to support the people I love the most”—will start you on a better path.

2. Take a vow of poverty—or at least modesty.
Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century Italian Catholic mystic and founder of the Franciscan order of Catholic priests and monks, began his life as a wealthy nobleman. His enlightenment came in his early 20s, when he had a vision in which he was called to give away all of his riches and live in poverty. This became the basis of his order, which he claimed would bring great joy to its members. “Blessed be my brother who goes out readily, begs humbly, and returns rejoicing,” he is said to have proclaimed to a member of his order.

I won’t ask you to live in poverty and turn to begging, but one small way to detach yourself from money-based social comparison (and earn a bit of Franciscan rejoicing instead) is to renounce consumption of the most opulent items you might buy. For example, instead of choosing the priciest, most ostentatious car you can afford, purchase one that is down a few rungs in price and status. I try to practice this; I won’t claim it as a path to sainthood, but it has helped remind me that my economic success does not represent who I am.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to buy happiness]

3. Spend quietly.
And what should you do with your leftover discretionary money? Here’s a useful answer for happiness: Spend it on experiences with people you love—without being showy about it—and on meaningful activities. So, for instance, go away for the weekend with a friend or partner and make a point of not posting a single picture of your getaway on social media, because that will probably lower your enjoyment of the experience. In fact, consider not taking any pictures, and instead resolve to be fully present, because that will surely enhance the experience.

One last idea, returning to the Buddhist tradition: In Zen, the meditation paradox is commonly illustrated using koans, which are riddling statements or puzzling epigrams that monks are taught to contemplate to help them move beyond logical thinking and reach a deeper understanding of life’s meaning. Here is a koan of my own devising that might capture the broader point in this essay: A man became rich by getting rid of his gold.

The superficial message of this aligns with the research that has shown how giving away your money to worthy causes raises your happiness. That’s fine and good. But ponder this koan more deeply, and see what it tells you. Ask what you consider gold—not just money, but any asset, talent, or strength you might be tempted to display, to demonstrate your worth to yourself and others. List those things that set you apart. Then contemplate how you could use them in a way that is not self-aggrandizing but that brings blessings to the world, and watch your fortune grow.

Feeling Desolate? There Is a Cure for That.

2025-10-16T12:00:00-04:00

Any darkening of the mind, disturbance therein, instigation to the lowest or earthly things; together with every disquietude and agitation, or temptation, which moves to distrust concerning salvation, and expels hope and charity; whence the soul feels that she is saddened, grows lukewarm, becomes torpid, and almost despairs of the mercy of God.

This is how Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order of priests, described “spiritual desolation” in 1548. He was referring to the feeling of emptiness that people tend to feel after the initial euphoria of a religious conversion. After the flush of new faith, which he calls “consolation,” life’s troubles return, people feel they have made a mistake, and they may fall away.

This desolation is not merely a religious phenomenon. It describes much of our experience when something new and beautiful sparks joy and enthusiasm but later becomes tedious and tiresome. Marriages, for example, notoriously suffer from the so-called seven-year itch, when passion gives way to boredom and conflict. Similarly, new jobs are exciting and interesting for a while but then become a grind or an oppression.

[Listen: How to live when you’re in pain]

One might easily conclude that the natural and appropriate course of action is to make a change at the point of desolation—to dissolve the relationship; quit the job; look for consolation again in novelty. But this may very well not be correct. One of the secrets to long-term well-being is to understand spiritual desolation not as a block to your well-being but as a pathway that promises personal growth. If you know how to use desolation to get to the other side, an even sweeter consolation awaits.

Ignatius described the initial, consolatory phase of faith as an “easy and light thing.” And so it is with most big life changes when they are both voluntary and new. Novelty per se stimulates attention, which is why marketing scholars have found that simply adding the word new to an advertisement enhances consumer interest (which is a basic positive emotion) in the product offered. In particular, people who score high in the personality trait of openness to experience find new life circumstances pleasurable.

We see this novelty effect very clearly in the research on marriages. In one 2010 study of 464 newlywed spouses, both husbands and wives enjoyed their highest marital satisfaction in the first four months after their wedding. This is not to say that divorce becomes a danger immediately after that honeymoon period; the risk of separation remains low for the first couple of years. But the incidence rises over time and peaks at about the five-year point, according to a 2014 study from Finland in the journal Demography. The data, in other words, suggest that this spike in marital desolation—characterized by boredom, decreased intimacy, and increased conflict—might more accurately be called a “five-year itch.”

Job satisfaction follows a similar cycle, although it moves more quickly. According to 2009 research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, people who change jobs and are committed to making a new job work (they fulfill their duties conscientiously and are socially integrated) register an increase in job satisfaction for the first three months. At this point, however, the consolation begins to fade and that satisfaction declines for the rest of the year, reaching a nadir at the end of the first year on the new job. This is when, in my experience, many people say they feel they made a mistake in changing jobs. Let’s call that the “one-year itch.”

Not all marriages fail after five years, nor does everyone quit their job after a year. Indeed, the latest longitudinal data (from couples married between 2010 and 2012) show that about 82 percent stay married for at least 10 years, and divorce risk continues declining after year five, all the way until one spouse dies. By the same token, nearly half of people have been in the same job for four years—and about one-quarter of workers stay in their gig for 10 years or more. This phenomenon of persistence has led researchers to ask how spouses or employees who stay the course succeed in getting over the hump of desolation and (presumably) finding renewed consolation in their marriage or job.

For the secret to that, we turn once again to Ignatius and what he had to say about keeping faith during the dark nights of the soul: “Learn not only to resist the adversary, but also to vanquish him.” That is, see desolation as a challenge to develop the skill of persisting in faith, rather than a reason to mourn the loss of a feeling you once had. So it is in other parts of life. What marriages and careers that last have in common is not that their participants somehow never encounter desolation but that they use the happiness trough as an opportunity to learn and grow.

In marriage, the couples who make it through the spell of despondency are those who grow from competition to collaboration. The early years of marriage generally involve a clash of individual wills. Researchers writing in the journal Family Relations showed that the spouses who get past the hump and are happiest in later years have each learned to mold their will to the other’s. These spouses see an increasing equality of decision making and household responsibilities; in couples who have religious faith, this convergence also manifests as a greater degree of shared observance over time and the mutual conviction that marriage should last until death. These skills and beliefs, forged through resolving conflict, cement the couple into a lifelong unit.

Similarly, the happiest workers are those who endure by learning and applying positive coping strategies in the face of the problems that characterize job desolation. One 2023 study of newly graduated nurses found that those who wound up with higher job satisfaction were not the ones who avoided workplace conflicts but those who acquired strength by facing challenges “directly and rationally.” Evading difficulties, or simply withdrawing, proved to be a nonlearning strategy that did not provide the reward of job satisfaction.

In most areas of life, especially those that involve maintaining relationships, periods of desolation will be part of the normal course of events. Taking our cue from Ignatius, social scientists like me might suggest three ways to turn the tough times into vital learning opportunities.

1. Stick to your knitting.
A time comes in the spiritual life, Ignatius asserts, when desolation cannot be denied or avoided. At such a moment, the right first move is to do nothing: “One must not deliberate on anything, or make any change concerning one’s purpose of mind, or state of life, but persevere in those things which had been settled before, suppose, during the preceding day or hour of consolation.” In other words, you should not fall prey to rash emotion (which he calls an “evil spirit”), and let it rule an imprudent decision to quit. Instead, you should recognize desolation as a normal feature of any relationship, with a person or an institution (such as an employer). Look at this difficult time the way you would regard root-canal work: with calm resignation and a confidence that, with the necessary dentistry, better times lie ahead.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Breakups always hurt, but you can shorten the suffering]

2. Get on the same side of the table.
For the religious believer, Ignatius’s approach to desolation is to see it not as the individual and God on opposite sides of a problem but you with God, facing your struggle and getting through it together. This conception offers the right approach in marriage too. A clash of wills is a mutual problem best solved collaboratively, not thrashed out competitively. Indeed, that is exactly what the research says delivers the skills for couples who make it to the post-itch consolation of a successful and happy marriage. This approach can be harder to implement at work, but is not impossible. I once met an executive who was heading off to a brutal bout of legal mediation with a competitor. He was remarkably upbeat about it, and when I asked why, he said, “Today, a nasty fight will end because we will both agree on a settlement.”

3. Do the work.
Patience is important in getting past desolation, which can last quite a while in faith, love, and work. But patience alone isn’t enough. Desolation can’t just be waited out. That is the recipe for becoming spiritually dead—a mere roommate with your spouse or a checked-out shell of an employee with your Zoom camera always switched off. Ignatius suggests the serious program of piety and prayer laid out in his famous Spiritual Exercises, a guide still used by millions to this day. Marriages in a state of desolation need a similar intervention, sometimes from counseling, just as a career on the rocks can benefit from coaching.

Of course, there are times when desolation can’t be fixed, and the best solution is dissolution. I won’t speak to the theological case, but this can certainly be true in marriages, especially when abuse or abandonment has occurred. And when it comes to work, a change from time to time can be a very good and healthy thing.

In these instances, we might extend Ignatius’s wisdom to learn and grow not just from desolation but from the dissolution itself. When a relationship has to end, either unhappily or amicably, valuable information is at hand—including the potential to learn from your own mistakes. Manage that, and your new consolations will be all the sweeter and deeper.

The Happiness of Choosing to Walk Alone

2025-10-09T12:00:00-04:00

Several years ago, I did some lecturing at a university in Moscow. One of my Russian colleagues had been involved in the dissident student movement in the 1980s, and talked a lot about how bad the regime was and how much most people hated it. I was curious about how, if it was so unpopular, the Soviet system managed to survive for so long. “Brute force?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was the fact that people pretended to support the government out of fear, giving everyone else the impression that they were alone in their private opinion, so they stayed silent. But eventually, the dissidents helped people figure out that hating the system was actually the majority view—at which point, the jig was up for the Kremlin.”

What had kept the U.S.S.R. population in chains for so long was what the author and scientist Todd Rose has termed a “collective illusion,” precisely this phenomenon of people holding an opinion that is widely shared but that they believe is theirs alone—thus staying silent from fear of persecution or rejection. In his writing and through the work of a think tank that he co-founded, called Populace, Rose has shown that this illusion affects not only people living under a dictatorship but also those in any society that demands a certain kind of cultural conformity. We even have our own version of it in parts of America today. Although no one would confuse the modern-day United States with the old Soviet Union, the dynamics of collective illusion are harming both our democracy and our individual well-being. Here is how to know if you are falling prey to a collective illusion—and how to break free from it without fear.

One way to find evidence of collective illusions is to ask people about the social pressure they may face to stay silent on their true point of view. As scholars at Populace point out in a recently published survey, this pressure is pervasive in the U.S., where 58 percent of people in a sampling of more than 19,000 citizens said they believed that “most people cannot share their honest opinions about sensitive topics in society today,” and 61 percent admitted to self-silencing.

[Listen: How to have a healthy argument]

Because of this pressure, people are routinely giving what they perceive to be more acceptable opinions in their social circles than those they truly possess. Take, for example, the Populace report’s findings about the controversial topic of “gender and diversity quotas” in executive positions within business. The demographic group in America most likely to publicly agree with this form of progressive action—showing 48 percent approval—is Gen Z, young people who have come of age in the past decade, when these ideas became more mainstream. But do these young adults truly agree with these kinds of DEI policies? When asked in the Populace survey what they privately believe, only 15 percent of them say they do—the same percentage as Baby Boomers. In other words, nearly 69 percent of Gen Zers who say that they agree publicly with such quotas are hiding their true feelings.

Or consider the question of whether we live in a mostly fair society. This issue has become a political football of late; older, more right-leaning Americans argue that we do, and younger, more left-leaning people say that we don’t. Populace finds that 62 percent of people from the Silent Generation (those born before 1946) publicly agree with the statement (compared with just 32 percent of Gen Zers), as do 50 percent of Republicans (versus 32 percent of Democrats). Privately, however, the rates of agreement among those in the survey are just 6 percent of older Americans and 11 percent of Republicans. In other words, Americans of all ages are now much more doubtful about whether they live in a fair society than they like to admit in public.

Everyone accepts a degree of “going along to get along” to make community life run smoothly, but the phenomenon being tracked here goes well beyond that. Rose and his colleagues see in these findings a threat to our society, insofar as self-silencing and collective illusions indicate a tyranny of the minority that suppresses citizens’ perception of the truth and free expression. The problem surpasses this, however. Collective illusions also exacerbate the negative well-being trends that I have previously documented. Saying one thing when you believe another is bad for your happiness. As researchers have long shown, this dissonance can induce psychological discomfort when it cannot be resolved. No surprise, then, that such dissonance is a common side effect of social anxiety and also associated with symptoms of depression. It creates a sense of dishonesty and inauthenticity: a gap between collective illusion and individual disillusion, you might say. This is what George Orwell’s concept of “doublethink” identified in his novel 1984, in which people are dehumanized by being forced to accede to two contradictory ideas—in this case, one thought and the other stated.

Why don’t people just say what they think and fix the dissonance? That’s not so easy. To part ways with what you believe or fear is the majority opinion, especially in a community such as a political group, means risking social exclusion, which is scary and painful. Experiments demonstrating this phenomenon have involved subjecting humans to fMRI brain scans while they play a multiperson game from which they are suddenly excluded. This exiling experience stimulated the subjects’ anterior cingulate cortex, part of the limbic system that processes emotional pain. When people go along with an opinion they disagree with but think is popular, they are in a catch-22 of inviting pain through cognitive dissonance by trying to avoid the pain of social rejection.

The way out of the collective-illusion catch-22 is to conquer the fear of rejection from stating your true opinion. The best guide to this that I have encountered comes from the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a co-founder of this magazine who helped formulate its motto, “Of no party or clique.” His 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” about which I have written before, is a handbook for breaking free of collective illusions. Here’s my three-part summary.

1. Stop lying.
Self-censorship creates a pattern of personal dishonesty. It’s one thing to refrain from saying something you think out of politeness; it is another thing entirely to say something you don’t think for the sake of self-advancement or out of fear. This, according to Emerson, is a self-betrayal. “Check this lying hospitality and lying affection,” he counsels. “Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.” For Emerson, to voluntarily utter a lie just to fit in is like choosing to live in a prison: True happiness requires freedom in the form of honesty, come what may. To those who might not like hearing your contrary opinion, Emerson offers this counsel: “If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.”

2. Reframe your independence.
Contradicting the majority is, of course, difficult and frightening. Emerson’s answer to this fear is to see it in a new way: “The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Your evolutionary tendency is to see the act of breaking from the group in terms of rejection and isolation, both of which are painful and scary. They evoke the image of one cast out of the tribe and wandering alone and defenseless. Nonsense, Emerson says. Recast rejection as going your own way, and isolation as benign solitude from the deafening chorus of agreement with what is popular but wrong. Make ideological independence your personal brand and hold your head high.

[Arthur C. Brooks: A gentler, better way to change minds]

3. Just walk away.
This advice might sound as if Emerson is advocating that you stomp off with your middle finger in the air. If you are a normal person, that sounds like a terrible way to behave—and fortunately, such defiance is not necessary. All that you need to become independent in your ideas is to separate your attention and energy from the source of acceptable but, in your mind, incorrect views. “If you are noble, I will love you,” he writes, but “if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions.” If, for example, your friends are, in your private opinion, spouting nonsense, you don’t have to refute or condemn them. Just quietly stop listening to them, and get some new friends.

To strengthen democracy and improve your happiness, here is the question I would ask you to consider: Which of your private opinions are different from what you tell others? They shouldn’t be hard to find. After all, as the Populace report bluntly states, “every single demographic group is misrepresenting their true opinions on multiple sensitive issues.”

Next, make a list of your unpopular opinions and an Emersonian plan to quietly declare your independence from what you believe is the erroneous mainstream or socially sanctioned view. In some cases, you will find that this seeming consensus wasn’t mainstream at all but a collective illusion, and you might just be the one to break it. In other cases, you will find that you truly are in the minority, and will walk alone. So be it.

The Mind-Altering Effect of a Good Workout Routine

2025-10-02T12:00:00-04:00

In a recent column, I wrote about the morning protocol I employ and recommend to increase well-being and manage negative affect (low mood). Part of that protocol involves starting the day with vigorous exercise. This recommendation provoked a lot of questions from readers: What kind of exercise is best for well-being? How often do you need to do it, and how long should it last? And what’s the best way to get started? I’ll answer these questions this week.

No official standards exist for the amount of exercise to optimize happiness, but if they did, most Americans would almost certainly fall below them—because most people don’t exercise enough, if at all. Only 24 percent of adults meet the federal guidelines for aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities. These guidelines do not exactly enter “gym rat” territory: at least 150 minutes a week (that’s about 21 minutes a day) of moderate activity such as brisk walking, plus a few body-weight exercises on different muscle groups (such as sit-ups or push-ups), at least twice a week.

The good news, then, is that the bar is reasonably low—you don’t need to train like an Olympic athlete to get the benefits of exercising. Most people have plenty of opportunity to get healthier and happier by doing something that involves no drugs or therapists, just a willingness to exert a little physical effort. For my excellent, curious readers, let me share what the science tells us works best for well-being.

Exercise has a good many different categories. Aerobic workouts, also known as endurance or cardio, involve such activities as running, cycling, and swimming. Strength or resistance training involves lifting weights. Flexibility encompasses yoga and stretching. Then there are any number of sports that one can play alone or with others. The categorization of exercise has evolved over time. For example, in a 1785 letter to his nephew recommending physical exertion, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun.” (One assumes he was referring to hunting, which—besides marksmanship—generally involved tramping for miles through field and forest.)

[Arthur C. Brooks: Six ways to start early and lift your mood]

Jefferson went on to explain why “the gun” was good: “While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independence to the mind.” Jefferson knew from experience what researchers later showed with data and experiments: Exercise strongly improves well-being—thanks, in part, to the positive effects on three neurochemicals that are associated with mood balance. These are the brain-derived neurotropic factor (which is lower in people with depression), serotonin (which modulates anxiety and mood), and beta-endorphin (a natural pain-managing peptide). Researchers have found that all forms of exercise are good for stimulating these neurochemical systems, but aerobic activity seems to have the strongest influence.

These mood-modifying brain effects are not the only well-being benefit of exercise. Yoga, for example, has been shown to be especially beneficial for the management of stress. Weight lifting can lead to increased confidence, regardless of gender and age—no doubt because it enhances a person’s physical appearance, as well as endowing them with a sense of greater strength. Most people who exercise regularly derive an improved feeling of community and accomplishment. Indeed, for many, being athletic becomes central to their identity.

So much for the dedicated exercisers, but those who can benefit most from adding exercise to their routine are exactly those you might expect: sedentary people. In other words, the person who can get the maximum happiness from exercise is the one who goes from nothing to something. In former non-exercisers, 12 weeks of regular aerobic activity lowered depressive symptoms by a third; feelings of hostility were also reduced (by 15 percent). Even among fairly fit people, adding more exercise to their routine has a positive impact on well-being. When moderate exercisers added a few extra workouts per week, their level of depressive symptoms after three months was 19 percent lower than a control group of people who didn’t add any workout.

In general, doing more exercise is better—though, at some point, adding more exercise becomes too much. When people continue to work out in spite of physical injury, personal inconvenience, or the strain that doing so may place on relationships, that is considered a behavioral addiction. I have met people who suffer considerable mental distress when they miss a day in the gym. And I have known people who neglected their partner in their pursuit of an extreme level of fitness. (You may have heard the joke that a partner’s sudden surge of gym activity is an early warning that they’re going to leave you.)

Exercise addiction is directly correlated with perfectionism, body dissatisfaction, depression, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. This syndrome is almost certainly exacerbated by social-media use, which reinforces unreasonable fitness and beauty standards that drive vulnerable people to unhealthy behaviors. In men, in particular, this chimerical pursuit can lead to the use of anabolic steroids, which can drive up depression and anxiety and carries the risk of a host of physical harms.

In short, the relationship between exercise and happiness is an inverted U curve: The benefits from starting out are very large, and they increase as one improves in fitness; at some point, however, the improvements flatten out, and start to fall. Here are three ways to use the research, no matter where you are in your fitness.

1. Acquire the habit.
The problem most people have when starting an exercise routine is sticking to it. Gyms famously have a flood of new members every January, but then see a significant drop-off in a matter of weeks—because people fail to make exercise habitual. Canadian researchers studying this phenomenon have found that success in establishing an exercise regimen requires about six weeks of adherence, at an average of four workouts a week. The likelihood of success is also highest when workouts are simple, on a consistent schedule, and free of judgment.

Figure out the best time of day for your timetable, choose four days each week, and block these out in your calendar for the next six weeks. Find the one cardio exercise you like best, at a convenient and nonjudgmental gym, and work out for 30 minutes each time. At the end of the six-week period, you will most likely have created the habit; then you can start changing times and exercises.

2. Design the workout to meet your emotional objective.
Once you have established the routine, ask yourself what challenge you most want to address. If that is negative mood, start doing cardio and up the dose as desired. If it is stress, try yoga. If your issue is self-confidence, lift weights. Play sports if you are looking for comradery and fun. Experiment with different techniques and types of exercise, and keep careful records on how each one is changing your well-being. You might want to devise a balanced, adjustable approach to fitness: I usually do resistance and cardio in equal proportion, but then scale one or the other depending on my well-being challenges at any time.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: In the age of Ozempic, what’s the point of working out?]

3. Do all things in moderation.
Good things easily become bad things in life if you exaggerate and overdo them—and that applies even to healthy behaviors such as exercise. I have heard many stories from people who suffered from dangerous addictions—to substances, certainly, and to destructive behaviors (perfectionism, workaholism)—and then used working out to help turn their life around, only to start exhibiting the same behavioral pattern in their exercise. If you are a hard-core gym buff, a couple of questions to consider are: whether not exercising gives you anxiety and whether working out is harming or crowding out your relationships. These are clues that you have ended up on the wrong side of the exercise-happiness benefit curve.

Over the years, I have found that I give one piece of advice more often than any other about this topic. One kind of exercise that nearly everyone can do, starting today; costs nothing; takes almost no skill; and has an exceptionally high impact on negative mood: going for a walk. Research has shown again and again that walking every day lowers depression and anxiety. It is also one of the safest forms of exercise because it rarely leads to injury from repetitive stress or accidents.

Some people believe that walking even transcends the physical and carries one into the metaphysical, which is why pilgrims walk long distances in many religious traditions. Regardless of whether you’re a religious person, try this tomorrow morning: Rise before dawn and hit the trail for an hour. Time your walk so that, near the end, you witness the sunrise. The pilgrimage that is the rest of your life will have begun.

If I Work Harder, Will You Love Me?

2025-09-25T12:00:00-04:00

Between teaching MBA students and speaking to a lot of business audiences, I’m often interacting with successful people who work extremely long hours. It’s common for me to hear about 13-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks, with few or no vacations. What I see among many of those I encounter is workaholism, a pathology characterized by continuing to work during discretionary time, thinking about work all the time, and pursuing job tasks well beyond what’s required to meet any need. Workaholics feel a compulsion to work even when they are already earning plenty of money and despite getting minimal enjoyment from doing so.

Does this sound familiar? If you do little else but work—and are mentally absent when not working—you are likely to find your life feels bereft of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Worst of all, compulsive overworking is incompatible with healthy intimate relationships, which take time, energy, and effort.

As with other addictions, telling a workaholic they’d be better off not doing the destructive behavior is unhelpful—as though just suggesting “Hey, why not work less?” will result in the person slapping their forehead and saying “I never thought of that!” Instead, I try to look behind the pathology to discover its origins. Typically, what I find in highly successful people is that an addiction to work is, in fact, based on an inchoate belief that love from others—including spouses, parents, and friends—can be earned only through constant toil and exceptional merit. Unchecked, this mistaken belief is catastrophic. But understanding the reasons behind this delusion can lead to healing.

Life offers two kinds of reward, which social scientists define as intrinsic and extrinsic. The first kind involves immaterial things that can’t be bought, such as love and happiness. The second kind involves material things that can be procured, such as money and goods. We want both kinds of reward, of course—even though we all know what research has shown over and over again: that once we have achieved a basic standard of living, we gain much greater life satisfaction from intrinsic rewards. Compare the scenario of driving to a fancy restaurant in your new Ferrari, where you will eat alone because you have no friends or family, with that of driving to Denny’s in a 1999 Corolla to hang out with people who truly love you.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The hidden link between workaholism and mental health]

And yet, millions of seemingly successful people act as if extrinsic rewards are all that count. Although they may not be totally bereft of loved ones, they live almost as if they were so, neglecting family and friends in favor of work, earning far more than their household needs to survive, even thrive. You can think of this as a crossed psychological circuit, resulting in a false conviction that intrinsic rewards can be bought with extrinsic currency. If I work hard enough and am sufficiently successful, thinks the workaholic, albeit unconsciously, then I will be worthy of the love I truly crave.

Why might someone fall prey to such an erroneous belief? It could be the way you were raised. Workaholic parents tend to have workaholic kids. If you grow up seeing adulthood modeled by people who work all hours and are rarely home, you can be forgiven for regarding this as appropriate behavior for a responsible spouse and parent. This is at least partly the same mechanism behind the fact that you are much likelier to become an alcoholic if you were raised by one.

Researchers have also shown that when parents express love for a child in a conditional way based on the child’s behavior, that person is likely to grow up feeling that they deserve love only through good conduct and hard work. This might sound as though I’m describing terrible parents, but I don’t mean to do so at all; well-intentioned parental encouragement can be heard by a child as a message about their worthiness.

In the workaholic’s case, it might look like this: Your parents wanted you to succeed in school and in life, so they gave you the most love and attention when you got good report cards, won at sports, or earned the top spot in the orchestra. You were a bright kid, and put two and two together: I am extra lovable when I earn accolades. In my experience, this describes the childhood of a lot of people who strove to be special to gain their parents’ attention, and who carry this behavior into adulthood by trying to earn the love of others through compulsive work.

If you’re tending toward workaholism, you may very well be discovering that the returns to work are falling below the costs to your life. You are likely defensive about your heavy work habit, and confused about why such a noble virtue is earning complaints at home, instead of praise. Here are three steps you can take to resolve this issue.

1. Look at your origins and face the truth.
Think back to your childhood: Did you struggle, say, to get your parents’ attention and affection unless you excelled in school or outside activities? Did being a “special” or a “bright” child make you feel loved? If so, don’t get mad at your folks: They were probably doing their best, perhaps trying to give you a better life than they’d had; or they may have been diligently following some now-outdated parenting advice. But the result is very likely that there’s a script in your head that says, You’re not inherently lovable as you are, so you better win the spelling bee. You are still trying to win some grown-up version of the spelling bee, even if your parents are long dead.

2. Give what you want to receive.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that “if you would be loved, love, and be loveable.” The profound truth behind this assertion is that you should give what you want to receive. So if you want more courtesy, start by being courteous to others. And if you want true love from your beloved, give them true love, in the intrinsic currency that satisfies our deeper needs. That means giving your self, not more money or things. Try this: Take a day away from work, turn off your phone, and give the person you love the attention they crave, all day.

[Derek Thompson: America’s fever of workaholism is finally breaking]

3. Make plans to change.
One day is not enough to repair your relationships, and big changes in your habits don’t take place overnight. If you were dependent on alcohol, say, I wouldn’t be so naive as to imagine that not drinking for a day would fix the problem. Breaking any addiction takes a lot of planning and resolve. Own up to your workaholism, acknowledge the roots of the problem, and work with your loved ones to make a long-term plan to live differently. That might mean planning a career or job change, in six months’ to a year’s time; scheduling weekend trips and tech-free vacations from now until then; and asking your family to hold you accountable for making progress.

Let me close with one of my many conversations with work-addicted strivers that makes the point better perhaps than any studies can. An older, very wealthy man told me how he worked himself to a husk to earn his fortune. While he ground away at building his company over the decades, barely talking to his wife and kids, he dreamed about how marvelous it would be to be wealthy. I asked him what he imagined it would be like to be so rich. He said that he thought of the obvious stuff, such as houses and cars. “But mostly,” he said, “I thought if I was rich, my wife would love me.”

“And?” I asked, noting that he was not wearing a ring.

“She didn’t.”

How Spinoza Overcame 17th-Century Cancel Culture

2025-09-18T12:00:00-04:00

Imagine that you had dedicated yourself to helping others think a little differently about life so they’d be happier and better off. You’ve put your whole heart into this work and made a lot of sacrifices in doing so. But you’ve gotten no appreciation from others—on the contrary, everyone’s said your ideas are garbage and you’re a rotten person for suggesting them. No doubt, you’d be bitter and disheartened.

That was exactly the situation in which the 17th-century Portuguese Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza found himself: working to make the world a happier, more harmonious place by arguing that God is everywhere, and that humans are one with him. But Spinoza was, in the words of his biographer Bertrand Russell, “considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.” For his work, he was rejected by his own Jewish community in Amsterdam for questioning the literal truth of the Bible; despised by Christian leaders for denying the personal, interventionist nature of the Divinity; and condemned by the civic-religious authorities as a threat to social stability. In today’s terms, Spinoza got canceled.

His cancellation did not harm him economically, because he made a good living not as a philosopher but by producing lenses, microscopes, and telescopes. Yet the repudiation of his life’s work had to hurt.

Despite all of this rejection, Spinoza used his philosophical insight to figure out how to manage his emotions and avoid dejection. Centuries before modern neuroscience, he developed an intuitive understanding of the relationship in the brain between emotion and reason and taught himself to maintain equanimity in spite of censure and contempt. Anyone today who faces the wrath of the cancel-scolds for trying to speak the truth can benefit greatly from his approach.

Most people in Spinoza’s situation would probably experience anger and fear—and that reaction would certainly be justified if their livelihood or social position was affected by the persecution. One thing that has changed, for the worse perhaps since Spinoza’s time, is that the cancel mob can be entirely virtual today. That hardly softens the effect of denunciation: You can feel as though the whole world is against you even if you know none of your tormentors in person. Spinoza would say that this sense of oppression is a form of emotional bondage. “When a man is a prey to his emotions,” he wrote in Ethics, “he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.”

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to stop freaking out]

What Spinoza thought of as fortune, we might today call the limbic system. This primitive console of brain tissue that largely controls emotion includes the amygdala, which is stimulated when you perceive a threat. In the estimation of many neuroscientists, fear is the master emotion because it clears all else and makes you focus on the immediate danger (a phenomenon that has been called an “amygdala hijack”). This may save your life if an actual tiger is after you, but most of the time this mechanism lowers your quality of life by leading you to say and do things you later regret. A hijacked amygdala can make you feel completely freaked out over something relatively insignificant—such as, say, a bunch of trolls attacking you online.

Spinoza had a solution to such emotional bondage: achieving greater consciousness. As he went on to explain in Ethics, for a person to be “scarcely at all disturbed in spirit,” he should be “conscious of himself, and of God, and of things.” The trick is not to eradicate the turbulence stoked by others’ disapproval that triggers primordial fears in your limbic system, but to have a rational understanding of exactly what that inner turmoil is. Knowledge, Spinoza argued, gives you power over your emotions.

Science bears this out. Rational observation of negative emotions is called “metacognition”: an awareness that uses the brain’s executive function to reach impartial judgment of thoughts and feelings. Metacognition moves the experience of your emotions from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex, where the emotions can be understood and you can decide whether they’re appropriate and productive.

Although metacognition takes practice and discipline, when you do it well, you can give yourself the sort of advice a rational observer of your situation would give you, rather than the hysterical commands a person flailing in terror would issue. So, instead of trying to out-troll the trolls, you would just be able to say to yourself, Delete the app and get on with your life.

You may object that such higher rationality will turn you into Mr. Spock from Star Trek, incapable of the emotional range that brings mystery and spontaneity to life. That isn’t Spinoza’s objective at all. He doesn’t want to eradicate emotions, but to regulate them so that they can be as productive and helpful as possible in any given situation. That could mean, for example, that you’re able to respond with courage and dignity when you are under attack—calibrating your anger appropriately, rather than acting out of panic.

Spinoza argued that this rationality sorts out not only earthly problems but heavenly ones as well. Though considered a heretic by Jews and Christians alike, he never lost his faith and maintained his belief in a good God whom he aspired to know more deeply and whom he might love more rationally than emotionally. An “intellectual love of God” was not to “imagine him as present,” Spinoza argued, but to “understand him to be eternal.”

You don’t have to embrace Spinoza’s theology to benefit from his philosophy of emotions. In times of strife and malice, Spinoza offers the best defense to free you from the fear of unjust reproval. Here are three ways to make use of his wisdom.

1. Take a beat.
When you were a child, your mother probably told you that if you’re angry, you should count to 10 before speaking. Spinoza would approve entirely: Pausing when you are emotionally aroused gives your rational executive centers time to catch up with your jumpy limbic system and make your self its “master,” as Spinoza might say. The habit of counting to 10 (some scholars recommend 30)—or saving that email in draft or waiting until tomorrow to post a social-media response—is an excellent one to adopt.

2. Understand your emotions.
When you are getting hijacked, Spinoza would generally counsel understanding before action—the metacognition I mentioned above and have written about before. You can pick from many practices to assist this; one I like is insight meditation (known by Buddhists as Maha-satipatthana), which allows you to observe your feelings at a distance. If you are religiously inclined, prayers of petition work in the same way. Alternatively, you can simply try journaling your feelings before reacting emotionally.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Sit with negative emotions. Don’t push them away].

3. Be your own therapist.
So you know the difference between emotion and reason, and you have the Spinozan technique for moving from one to the other. Thus armed, try adopting the kind of advice that you would give a close friend—as a way to manage obstructive feelings and embrace emotions that are in your interest. If someone insulted this hypothetical friend, in public or online, you would probably encourage them not to freak out and get into a huge battle, and instead maintain a respectful but firm attitude. Say what you think in the right medium, in a rational and measured way, you might advise, and then move on. Then take that very solid advice from you, and make it to you.

Spinoza’s emotional-management protocol sounds simple enough in theory, but how did it work in practice—for him? True, he never won public affection during his lifetime (nor did his reputation improve in the century that followed). But as reviled as he was by all the arbiters who counted in his day, did he succumb to despair and rail against those ignorant scolds? Not a bit. “Unlike some other philosophers, he not only believed his own doctrines, but practised them,” writes Russell, his biographer—and himself a celebrated philosopher. “I do not know of any occasion, in spite of great provocation, in which he was betrayed into the kind of heat or anger that his ethic condemned.”

And he lived out his own ethic to the end. “On the last day of his life he was entirely calm,” Russell writes. Spinoza had canceled his cancelers where it really mattered: in his own mind.

Six Ways to Start Early and Lift Your Mood

2025-09-11T12:00:00-04:00

This column generally focuses on how to become happier. But over the years, I’ve found that the questions I most often get from readers are less about getting happier and more about becoming less unhappy. People inquire about how to resolve relationship disputes, quit a job they hate, or deal with anxiety and sadness. Getting happier or less unhappy might strike you as equivalent efforts, but they aren’t. Indeed, neuroscientists have found evidence that certain positive and negative emotions are produced in different regions of the brain. This makes sense when we understand that emotions exist to alert us to opportunities and threats, and parts of the limbic system specialize in producing each type of notification.

This distinction between your positive and negative emotions also means that their intensity does not move in tandem. Having below- or above-average intensity in positive and negative moods—which psychologists call affect—has been a topic of a lot of research, and it has led scholars to develop a test called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. You can take the test yourself and learn whether you are above average in both positive and negative affect (the so-called Mad Scientist profile), high positive and low negative (the Cheerleader), high negative and low positive (the Poet), or low on both positive and negative (the Judge).

What this test will tell you is whether your personal well-being challenge involves getting happier (Judges), getting less unhappy (Mad Scientists), or both (Poets). If you’re a Cheerleader and doing great on both counts, bully for you. I’m not. In fact, I am way out on the Mad Scientist fringe, scoring in the 90th percentile for both positive and negative affect. My own problem is not, as a rule, how to feel happier but how to manage intense levels of negative affect. Although this characteristic of mine does not constitute anything clinically concerning (it’s not constant), if unchecked, it can really damage my well-being.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why an early start is the ‘quintessence of life’]

Especially for those, like me, who feel negative affect intensely, one’s experience can vary a lot over the course of a day. Some people feel best in the morning and are grumpier at night. I tend to experience the reverse, with my highest negative affect coming in the early hours of the day. This is probably because of elevated stress-hormone levels in the hours after waking, sometimes exacerbated by poor sleep, a trait I inherited from my father (and his father).

So my personal well-being challenge is to manage strong negative affect in the morning. I do this with the help of a six-part daily protocol, based on the neuroscience and behavioral-science research that is my trade. If you, like me, struggle to feel human in the morning, this protocol can probably help you. If you’re a Poet or Judge, or you simply want to stay a Cheerleader, then you can surely find ways of adapting the routine that, regardless of the time of day, work for you.

1. Experience the brāhma muhūrta.
I rise daily at 4:30 a.m. In the Hindu religion, brāhma muhūrta means “the creator’s time” and refers to the period that begins precisely one hour and 36 minutes before sunrise. This is a time considered to have powerful properties, when the mind is most receptive to spiritual awakening. Although modern neuroscience has found no evidence for positive effects that one might experience by rising precisely 1 hour and 36 minutes before sunrise, good experimental—not just observational or anecdotal—evidence suggests that predawn rising can lead to better attentiveness and recall throughout the day. A benefit from this discipline that particularly improves one’s affect is waking to the light of dawn, which research has shown lifts mood.

Some people might be skeptical, feeling that they’re not a morning-lark chronotype (as opposed to the night-owl variety). They will typically cite what they regard as their natural, biological sleep timing. Fair enough, because studies tend to show that a person’s chronotype is partly their genetic inheritance. But sleep behavior and patterns are also highly environmental, which means they can be altered with training. In my 20s, I was convinced that I was a natural night owl; I never saw the sunrise. In fact, I was actually just a musician who drank too much. With some effort, I shifted myself to a morning-lark schedule, a change that has been found to be very worthwhile for many people.

2. Get physical.
My first activity, starting at 4:45 a.m., is to exercise for an hour—usually 30 minutes of heavy-resistance training (weight lifting) plus 30 minutes of “zone 2” cardio (a degree of exertion that induces heavy breathing but still permits one to talk). Lots of research has shown that a person’s mood improves and depressive symptoms decrease with vigorous physical exercise. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced by neuroscientists to explain this finding. For example, depressed people tend to have lower hippocampal volume than others; strenuous exercise works to reverse this.

Is 5 o’clock in the morning optimal for this effect? Fitness experts and scholars argue endlessly about the best time of day to exercise, but those arguments are always about strength and muscle building, not mood management. For optimal mood management, I think the answer is obvious: Exercise when you need it the most. For me, that’s the morning—bearing in mind, also, that exercise late in the day can disrupt one’s sleep, which is bad for well-being.

3. Get metaphysical.
After exercise, I get cleaned up and, at 6:30 a.m., go to daily Catholic Mass with my wife. This lasts for about 30 minutes. When I am on the road, which is roughly half of the time, and cannot attend Mass, I instead pray the rosary, a venerable Catholic meditation that takes about 25 minutes. Obviously, if you are not Catholic, this is not for you. But focused meditation or prayer of some sort—whether formally religious or not—is an important component of this protocol. Research has shown that these activities are very effective for emotional self-management. Prayer, for example, allows one to express emotion safely, reinforces positive self-appraisals, and facilitates reflection on one’s own feelings. Meditation, even by the inexperienced and for short periods, can significantly lower negative mood. As with exercise, at least one of the neural mechanisms involved in meditation operates in the hippocampus, which is generally larger in volume among meditators than nonmeditators.

4. The magic bean.
By the time I’m back from Mass, I have been awake for three hours and have taken no sustenance besides water and a multivitamin. This is the point at which I introduce caffeine. I love coffee and have been drinking a very dark roast since the eighth grade, as I was growing up in 1970s Seattle near the first Starbucks. Coffee is central to my negative-affect management, and I am not alone: Millions of other people do the same—and for good neuroscientific reasons.

Caffeine blocks the A2A receptors in the brain from detecting adenosine, a neuromodulator that depresses energy and promotes drowsiness. Caffeine doesn’t in fact pep you up; rather, it stops you from feeling lethargic. More important, being moderately caffeinated demonstrably lowers one’s negative affect. The reason appears to be that the chronic stress some people experience—Mad Scientists in particular, I’d wager—increases the density of their A2A adenosine receptors, making a depressed affect more pronounced. Caffeine disrupts this process.

You might wonder why I don’t take a couple of hits from the old espresso machine first thing, at 4:30 a.m., instead of waiting for several hours. I have experimented with caffeine timing over the years and found that, as others have hypothesized, delaying my intake reduces the coffee crash that I get in the early afternoon if I’ve had my coffee many more hours beforehand. I also prefer not to have any stimulant in my system during prayer.

5. Tryptophan time.
With my coffee I take my first meal, which is a large dose of protein in the form of unsweetened Greek yogurt, whey protein, nuts, and berries. In general, I try to get 150 to 200 grams (roughly 5 to 7 ounces) of protein a day to fight sarcopenia and maintain healthy muscle mass—something vital to do after age 60—so this first meal gets me well on my way toward that goal. But the affect-management properties of this first meal are significant as well. Researchers have shown that proteins that are high in an essential amino acid named tryptophan raise serotonin activity in the brain. In other words, this dietary approach improves mood by encouraging calm.

Don’t get me wrong: I crave a plate of waffles as much as the next person does. But I have learned that staying with clean protein helps me establish an emotional equilibrium that lasts to midday, when I hit the same dietary lever again with another protein-rich meal.

[Read: Can medieval sleeping habits fix America’s insomnia?]

6. Get into the flow.
The last element of this morning protocol is work, to which I turn my attention by about 7:30 a.m. When I am at home, my mornings are dedicated to creative activity. I take almost no meetings or calls before noon so that I can get several hours of uninterrupted time to write, prepare lectures, develop new ideas, and read research by others. This is work that I love, in which I achieve flow—the intensely rewarding psychological state of absorption and focus first identified by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the ’70s.

The flow state, which balances mastery and challenge in such a way that I am fully engaged yet not stressed out, is closely linked to an improved affect balance, raising positive mood and lowering negative mood. When I experience flow fully, aided by the neurochemical balance achieved through the prior five steps, I can easily and productively work for four hours with minimal breaks. This is when my creative output is highest, in both quantity and quality, and when my negative affect is least problematic.

These six protocols have changed my life in a very positive way. I wish I’d had the knowledge to develop them—and the discipline to stick with them—when I was 30. But that would have been impossible: They have required decades of education, lots of research, and experimenting with what works best for me. None of that was accessible to me when I was younger.

Your challenges may be different from mine, as will be what works best for you. But if your affect profile is at all similar, you might want to use this protocol as a starting point. Then you can carefully vary each of the elements, keeping painstaking records of the results. In short, be a Mad Scientist working on your own experiment. I predict that your well-being will improve as each new day’s peevishness evaporates through your efforts.

How to Turn Anxiety Into Adventure

2025-09-04T12:00:00-04:00

Recently, a friend celebrating a milestone birthday (one signaling that the second half of life was upon her) announced that her new goal was to stop feeling so anxious about everything, and instead to have fun—to make her life “an adventure.” She asked for my advice on how to do that. I told her about something that the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified back in the 19th century as “an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition.” He regarded this as “the most important thing” in life.

Was he talking about climbing Mount Everest or running a marathon—or whatever feat equated to those adventurous things in the 1840s? No: Kierkegaard was referring to anxiety itself. He believed that understanding and using one’s anxiety was the great opportunity and adventure of life.

That might sound like a very strange proposition today, in light of the fact that, as my Atlantic colleague Scott Stossel—the author of My Age of Anxiety—has written, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in America today, affecting more than 40 million adults at any given time (and far more women than men). Anxiety seems to most people a scourge, not an opportunity: something to eliminate if at all possible. But for my friend, as for most of us, Kierkegaard was right. Within healthy boundaries and when properly managed, anxiety is an integral part of life that can afford learning, raise performance, and even make life an adventure.

Although people talk a lot about anxiety, the state of being anxious can be hard for people to define, and especially to distinguish from such similar conditions as fear, worry, or stress. One way to understand how these conditions combine, based on what I’ve previously written in this column, might be to recognize that anxiety is an unfocused form of fear characterized by recursive negative thoughts (worries) and physiological manifestations (stress). Evolutionary biologists do not regard anxiety as a glitch in the human neural and perceptual systems; on the contrary, it is clearly part of an alarm system that helps keep potential hazards from turning into actual harm.

[Read: Anxiety is like exercise]

Chronic anxiety, however, can become a maladaptation. If this alarm system is set with too low a threshold, like a smoke detector that goes off in your house every time you cook, then its sensitivity is a problem. Everyday stimuli—such as, say, going to a party or talking in front of a few other people—shouldn’t make you anxious; if it does, then you could be experiencing dysregulation. You would not be alone. As researchers have documented, the incidence of anxiety as a disorder—meaning that it significantly interferes with one’s functioning and quality of life—has risen across the population. This is especially visible among adolescents and young adults: From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds in the United States diagnosed with an anxiety disorder nearly doubled, to about 15 percent. More recently, younger cohorts have been hurting, too: Among children and adolescents during the coronavirus pandemic, the rate doubled to more than 20 percent.

No absolute consensus about the cause of these increases exists, but considerable evidence points to the rise of social media. According to the American Psychological Association, the average American teenager spends nearly five hours a day on these platforms. As scholars in 2017 showed, the risk of anxiety as a disorder rises with the amount of time a person spends on social media. This risk factor was exacerbated during the pandemic lockdowns, likely by loneliness, money worries, reduced physical activity, and domestic strife.

Excessive anxiety imposes both psychological and physical costs. People with chronic anxiety have been found to have high levels of interleukin-6, which can lead to autoimmune disorders and certain cancers. This cytokine protein—a messenger chemical involved in cells’ signaling system—is also associated with coronary heart disease; some researchers assert that highly anxious people face an increased rate of heart attack, one that is comparable to that of smokers.

Given all of this, you might think that anxiety at any level is an unmitigated evil, to be avoided whenever possible and minimized when experienced. But that is not correct.

To begin with, remember that anxiety is protective insofar as it alerts you to potential threats. If you eliminate all anxiety when you’re driving, for example, you may not be sufficiently alert to the dangers of traffic. Anecdotal accounts also attest to some upside to feeling anxious: Even people who experience what is generally regarded as a debilitating level have noted that they derive some emotional benefits from their anxiety. As Stossel notes, anxiety can raise one’s awareness of others, promote empathy, and bring one greater self-knowledge.

How does this all square with a Kierkegaardian adventure? The research on optimal experiences may help with the answer to that question. In 2014, scholars writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology published a study on how a person’s anxiety while performing a task affected “flow,” the intensely rewarding state of absorption and focus originally identified in the 1970s by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The researchers found that flow states in people performing a complex computer task were highest when subjects displayed a moderate level of sympathetic arousal and activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis—when, in other words, they felt some anxiety but were not overwhelmed by it. Perhaps you can relate to feeling fully alive when you’re working within your abilities but are just on the edge of them.

The adventure can be philosophical as well. A study published earlier this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology looked at transformative life experiences that provoked existential anxiety, such as immigration, illness, and even violence. The researcher found that although no one wished to relive these stressful events, they later tended to report various benefits from their exposure to anxiety: They felt freed from limitations imposed by their past life, had a clearer understanding of life’s meaning, and were better able to find authentic direction in their life. Many of those surveyed said that they were in fact grateful for the experience.

Clearly, a disorder that involves dysregulated and debilitating anxiety should not be minimized, but rather treated as a serious medical issue. But anxiety per se is not the enemy; it can even be a friend if understood and managed correctly. Here’s what I told my significant-birthday friend about how to achieve that.

The first step is to accept anxiety as a normal occurrence, not suppress it. This can be very hard if you have spent a lifetime with the assumption that feeling anxious is harming you and needs to be eliminated. And in any case, elimination doesn’t work: Experiments from 2009 found that people instructed to suppress their anxious behaviors felt that their anxiety increased, compared with when they were instructed to accept these feelings. Whether at work or at home, when the alarm goes off and the stress hormones rise, try simply telling yourself, “This is just my brain alerting me to something out of the ordinary.”

[Arthur C. Brooks: The secret to thinking your way out of anxiety]

Step two is to remember that for an adventure, “out of the ordinary” is exactly what you want, and to reframe anxiety, not as dread but as evidence of an exciting opportunity. The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Kevin Majeres has defined anxiety as “adrenaline with a negative frame.” The right objective is not to get rid of the adrenaline, which is a performance-enhancing hormone, but to change the frame. This can be as simple as saying, when something is stressing you out, “This is exciting.”

So this is what I recommended to my friend: “Sure, go have some big, new life experiences to create adventure in your second half of life. But also, deepen your engagement with the life you already have—and focus on the parts that have always freaked you out, such as conflicts in the workplace or at home, worries about your health or the state of the world, and whatever else it is that keeps you up at night.

“Start by fully realizing and accepting these sources of anxiety, one by one. Then reframe each instance as an exciting challenge, not as a black cloud. Envision yourself engaging in a new, energetic way with your spouse; putting together a whole new plan for bettering your health or rebuilding your career; or taking constructive action for a cause that you care about. This positive response is what will turn the source of your anxiety into an adventure—and make you a lot happier to boot.”

My friend asked a follow-up question: “If I take this advice, does it mean I won’t mind my anxiety anymore?” “No,” I said, “you probably still won’t like it.” Anxiety is, in Kierkegaard’s words, the “dizziness of freedom”—the cost of doing the business of being fully alive. You always have to pay that cost, and it is not supposed to feel good. It’s just supposed to be worth it.

What Social Science Knows About the Value of Diversity

2025-08-28T12:00:00-04:00

One of the prickliest issues in business over the past decade is encapsulated in a single word: diversity. Starting in the 2000s, the received wisdom from consultants and human-resource firms was that increasing some kinds of diversity—predominantly race and gender—would improve not only fairness but business outcomes as well. A boom in DEI programs occurred at organizations large and small. These programs institutionalized new hiring and promotion targets, mandated diversity training, and revised grievance systems.

Two decades on, DEI programs have come under attack. Some of this criticism has involved a political backlash, but some has involved research questioning their effectiveness. As far back as 2016, Harvard Business Review published an article titled “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” showing that, as generally practiced, DEI programs actually reduced gender and racial diversity in companies. Last year, psychologists reviewing the literature found that these policies also generally lowered the performance of the targeted groups and increased the perception of workplace unfairness. Many companies are now rapidly unwinding DEI programs.

Companies tend to run in a herd, which results in being either all in or all out for an innovation such as DEI. But if we allow the debate about DEI to fall into this binary trap, where diversity is just great or totally terrible, we risk losing some important insights. Instead, we should expand our understanding of the ways that diversity can truly enhance organizational success, and focus on those.

There are two kinds of human diversity. The first is the type celebrated by the philosopher Aristotle, who argued that because “of all animals man alone is capable of deliberation,” we have a unique potential to be the most diverse species on Earth. He was talking about what modern researchers call acquired attributes—education, skills, opinions, and the like. This is not the kind of diversity that most DEI programs focus on, which is the second type, based on innate or inherited attributes such as race.

[Conor Friedersdorf: ‘DEI’ has lost all meaning]

The early business case for higher diversity of this second type came from studies purporting to find that it was good for financial performance. One such survey in 2009 linked greater representation of women and minorities on sales teams to better results; another study, involving experiments with college students, showed that when small teams assigned a murder-mystery puzzle were all white, they discussed the problem less than when they included a minority member, and the greater discussion led to improved outcomes.

Whether these benefits resulted specifically from greater racial and gender diversity was not clear, however. Another plausible explanation is that the team’s decision making improved by having people on the team from different backgrounds and with divergent experiences and opinions—diversity more of the Aristotelian variety, which newer research finds to be truly valuable. The most effective teams are cognitively and creatively diverse, combining people who come up with different kinds of ideas with others who are good at developing those ideas.

This is especially important for driving innovation, according to a 2020 study. But it doesn’t stop with creative style. The authors also found that ideological diversity among colleagues—seeing the world in different, even opposing ways—was beneficial (though “too much” ideological diversity, implying more frequent disagreement, had a negative effect on innovation). An obvious conclusion from this finding is that viewpoint diversity protects against groupthink, which has been shown to harm companies.

This isn’t so easy, however. Some people naturally embrace or resist diversity in ideas and thinking, which is at least in part a function of personality. Writing in 2023 in the Journal of Research in Personality, three psychologists found that people high in extroversion and openness enjoy “psychological richness” (meaning diverse experiences that change a person’s perspective) much more than introverts and those low in openness. Personality traits such as these are about half genetic. And for some people, a resistance to new ideas is biological: Research has linked varying degrees of openness with activity of the amygdala, which also controls the fight-or-flight response. In short, it is possible that new ideas might scare some people.

Achieving ideological diversity in the workplace is especially tricky because, in aggregate, people’s resistance to accepting political differences is growing. According to the polling firm YouGov, back in 2016, only 10 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said they had no friends with whom they significantly differed politically; by 2020, this figure had risen to 12 percent for Republicans and 24 percent for Democrats. This trend was corroborated by the research firm Generation Lab and the publication Axios, which found in 2021 that 71 percent of college students who are Democrats said they wouldn’t go on a date with a Republican, while 31 percent of Republican college students said they wouldn’t date a Democrat. Similarly, 41 percent of Democratic college students would not support a Republican-run business, 37 percent would not be friends with a Republican, and 30 percent would not work for one. (The Republican numbers regarding Democrats were 7, 5, and 7 percent.) You probably have your own ideas about how to account for this. Unfortunately, though, I am not aware of any differential studies of the amygdala response of progressives and conservatives.

Whatever the fate of modern DEI programs in corporate America, diversity of experience, thought, and ideology is a meritorious goal for a company to pursue. Done right, it will be good for business. Here are three pointers for that purpose.

1. Demographic proxies are not enough for useful diversity.

I have little doubt that diversity of ideas and experience correlate to some degree with categories of race and gender. But the research above has shown the possible costs of using these categories as proxy measures. This practice may harm the very people they purport to help, not least by making implicit assumptions about the way people of a particular gender or race think and act—which is not just incorrect and counterproductive, but also fairly insulting. Companies need to identify different kinds of thinkers without relying on demographic categories as a shortcut to do the sorting.

[Listen: The great political sort is happening at the office]

2. Look for people with high openness to new ideas.

The diversity that has the greatest business benefit is in people’s style of thinking and how they see the world. Look for ways to get more balance and broader representation in your workplace by making this a priority. For example, search specifically both for people who have a lot of ideas and for people who are passionate about bringing ideas to fruition. By all means, seek those who learned critical-thinking skills at good universities, but also seek those formed by very different experiences—in the military, in missionary or volunteer work, or through a hardscrabble childhood.

3. Get serious about political diversity.

I shared the evidence on political intolerance, but political views might seem a special case, outside the concept of diversity we’re trying to address here. I don’t believe it is. By all means, encourage civility and tolerance at work—no one needs a pot-stirrer who bullies others with their opinions and creates bad blood—but true political diversity can offer a trove of valuable market information and keep organizations from making errors. Think of the companies that have stumbled into a major political controversy because they assumed that what everyone in their bubble thinks is the same as what everyone in the rest of this huge country thinks. Political diversity protects against that.

Diversity of thought is, in many ways, harder to be comfortable with than demographic diversity. Here’s one last thought about how to make viewpoint diversity easier to achieve in the workplace and in life: Cultivate curiosity. I have written previously that a good way to achieve a more harmonious life with friends and relatives who vote and think differently is to adopt the mindset of a social scientist, genuinely fascinated by the things that others believe and say, without having either to agree or to do battle. Lots of research shows that such curiosity about others can foster trust, well-being, even health.

Corporate leaders are in an ideal position to turn curiosity about others’ beliefs into a cultural norm. This will attract and empower the diversity most needed in our society today. And it’ll be great for their business, too.

Five Baha’i Lessons for a Happier Life

2025-08-21T12:00:00-04:00

Updated at 10:27 p.m. ET on August 21, 2025

One of the biggest gripes I have about my academic field of social science is that it explains a lot about human behavior but is very short on prescriptions for how to live day to day. Even when it does have something suggestive to offer, the research almost never supplies evidence of whether its widespread adoption would have a positive effect. The same deficiency is even truer for philosophy, a realm in which big thoughts about life usually remain abstract ideas.

In my case, I can resort to a branch of human knowledge that parallels social science and philosophy and is a true laboratory of human behavior and experience. In this field, people think big ideas and act differently because of them, and then we can observe whether doing so enhances their lives. I am talking about religion.

Religions in effect ask people to opt into mass human experiments, which require them to convert to a new way of thinking and to live differently from nonbelievers, all in pursuit of particular benefits (both in life and after death). Even for those who don’t practice a religion and merely observe religious people, such study can be an invaluable source of information. Indeed, researchers have shown that learning about different faiths promotes a deeper understanding of psychology and culture.

[Listen: Can religion make you happy?]

I was reminded of this recently when my friend Rainn Wilson (of The Office fame), who hosts a popular spiritual podcast called Soul Boom, texted me some words of encouragement from his personal faith, Baha’i (pronounced buh-high), in response to a note of desolation I had sounded about the state of the world: “All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.” His meaning, as I took it, was that we should see such troubles not as a reason for despair but as a blessed opportunity to meet the greater need for love and happiness. Intrigued by Wilson’s religiously inspired advice, I decided to dig further into the Baha’i faith. There, I found valuable lessons about happiness that can benefit anyone, regardless of religious commitment.

The Baha’i faith originated in mid-19th-century Persia (known today as Iran), with pronouncements about God and life from a prophet named Bahá’u'lláh. His teaching—that all religions are valid and come from a loving God—spread quickly and gained many followers. After Bahá’u'lláh’s death, the faith was passed down through his son ‘Abdu'l-Bahá and great-grandson Shoghí Effendi, and disseminated by many other teachers. Because Baha’i teachings departed from Islam, they were considered heresies by Persian clerics, and the faith and its proponents were violently suppressed. Bahá’u'lláh himself was first imprisoned and then exiled; many of his followers were executed. To this day in Iran, the Baha’i faith is illegal and its followers are persecuted—barred from attending university, holding a government job, or inheriting property.

Despite this repression in its place of origin, Baha’i’s message is remarkably positive and nonapocalyptic. The faith now counts more than 5 million adherents worldwide, including about 175,000 in the United States. Bahá’u'lláh spoke often about happiness in spite of worldly troubles, which he saw as a normal feature of life, even a part of God’s plan. “Happy is the man that hath apprehended the Purpose of God in whatever He hath revealed from the Heaven of His Will,” he said. He was certainly onto something: As social scientists have shown, middle-aged people who trust God in the face of hardship have lower depression and better self-rated health than those who don’t, and people who choose to focus optimistically on the positive aspects of life enjoy much greater well-being than those who don’t.

To accentuate the positive is not to deny present difficulty or suffering. In fact, acknowledging pain is central to realizing a better future. “Men who suffer not, attain no perfection,” taught ‘Abdu'l‑Bahá. “The more a man is chastened, the greater is the harvest of spiritual virtues shown forth by him.” This message contradicts our prevailing modern culture that pain is a pathology to be eliminated; it teaches instead the deeply needed truth that suffering is a part of every life and important for learning and growth. This is consistent with the large literature on post-traumatic growth, which shows that making sense of suffering in life tends to enhance personal resilience, spiritual capacity, appreciation for life, and relationships with others.

Baha’i teaching is rigorous, spiritual, and deeply moral, which runs counter to a modern libertine culture that valorizes instant pleasure and transactional ethics. “Happiness consists of two kinds; physical and spiritual,” ‘Abdu'l-Bahá taught. “The physical happiness is limited; its utmost duration is one day, one month, one year. It hath no result. Spiritual happiness is eternal and unfathomable.” This is an age-old argument, reaching back to the ancient Greek conflict between hedonia (pleasure seeking) and eudaimonia (virtue seeking). The quest for virtue yields better results according to empirical scrutiny, which finds that eudaimonia delivers more lasting well-being.

Another point that we moderns typically neglect is an assertion that Shoghí Effendi made: “The more we make others happy the greater will be our own happiness and the deeper our sense of having served humanity.” In other words, you can’t be happy by working solely on your own well-being; in fact, you’re well advised not even to start with your own happiness in mind. As psychologists have long shown in experiments, acts of kindness toward others are far better at producing happiness than what has entered the lexicon as “self-care.” When people are induced to help others in an activity, recalling that experience gives them higher positive emotion than having worked for their own gain.

These teachings may seem like reminders, rather than new ideas, about how to live a good and upright life. Indeed, more recent Baha’i teaching has emphasized the pitfalls of novelty: The 20th-century scholar and historian Adib Taherzadeh warned against “trivial or sensational ideologies” that lead to “cults which become fashionable for a time. But when the novelty wears off or dissatisfaction sets in,” the adherents are left still searching for the next big thing—and “few have found happiness or peace of mind.” This insight is profoundly important today, at a time when the internet offers novel identities and lifestyles that beguile the most vulnerable but tend to lower well-being and a sense of life’s meaning. When it comes to love, sacrifice, and charity, the old ways are—for the most part—the best ways.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to make life more transcendent]

Taken together, these Baha’i tenets form a strategy for living that, to my mind, combines the best of behavioral science and philosophy. They also offer the added advantage of being tried and tested by millions of Baha’i believers who have found that these teachings help build a good life. In that spirit, I have started following these five lessons as part of my morning practice of reflection and meditation—and I can report that I very much like the effect they’re having on my life.

1. Have faith in the future. Whatever may come to pass is all part of the greater plan. Conform your will to the divine will, and you will find that it is good.

2. Are you uncomfortable? Good. This means that you are learning and growing as a person, because all growth comes with experiencing discomfort.

3. Today, seek happiness that is deeper than what comes from easy pleasures. Pass on the recreations that offer only empty calories and turn away from time-wasting distractions. Instead, look to what nourishes the body and soul.

4. You cannot be happy yourself without the happiness of others. Seek first to uplift, and then be uplifted. To serve others is to expand your own well-being.

5. There are no corners to cut in being the person you want to be. Today, live the truths of the ancient wisdom without hesitation or embarrassment before the modern world. Ignore the passing fads with their hollow promises.

These abridged lessons are no substitute for a deeper understanding of Baha’i, which is, after all, an actual religion, not a self-help philosophy. With that caution in mind, I sent this essay to Wilson to get his feedback as a true follower of the Baha’i faith. Expressing his approval, he offered a few words about how Baha’i has affected his own life:

What I love about my faith is that it provides a two-fold moral path toward meaning and joy. One is more internal, filled with mystical writings to foster spiritual growth and connect us to the divine winds; the other is more externally focused, where service to humanity and our role in that arena act as a spiritual compass. In the faith we strive to walk both paths—seeking internal enrichment and wisdom while also trying to make the world a more loving place.

To a happiness specialist (and devoted Catholic) like me, this is deeply compelling. As Rainn knows—because he couldn’t resist adding: “You should definitely convert, bro.”

This article has been updated to remove a reference to the Baha’i faith as an offshoot of Islam.

A Management Anti-Fad That Will Last Forever

2025-08-12T11:00:00-04:00

The world of management is always wide open for new ideas and perspectives to make companies more efficient and profitable. Most business schools have semi-academic journals dedicated to offering up buzzy techniques that promise to streamline operations, improve accountability, and raise productivity by establishing tightly circumscribed protocols for workers. Some recommendations have merit, but others are seen both inside and outside companies as gimmicks, fads to be endured until abandoned by managers when they move on to the Next Big Thing.

Take Six Sigma, the defect-minimization strategy that was all the rage in the 1980s: Its methodology involved certifying managers with progressively more prestigious colors to encourage their advance in skill level—rather as karate or judo belts do. (Even though these were color-coded paper certificates, I like to imagine the regional vice president for sales wearing a red belt over their suit.) No doubt, some firms found the exercise useful, but as the business writer Geoffrey James notes, employees typically found Six Sigma’s implementation frustrating and confusing. And according to data from 2006, among the large companies that adopted the program, 91 percent wound up trailing the S&P 500 in stock performance.

[Ed Zitron: How to mentor young workers in a remote world]

In place of such chimerical strategies, I want to introduce a management anti-fad. The idea will still raise business performance—by increasing happiness among the people doing the work. This idea is as old as humanity itself, you might correctly think, but if it were so obvious and simple to put into practice, then every company would be doing it. Recent research, including studies conducted both by independent academics and by firms themselves, show that understanding well-being and maximizing it through managerial practice can significantly increase productivity and profitability, as well as raise employees’ quality of life. And this conclusion might just help us remember some old wisdom that modern life encourages us to forget.

The premise that workers would be more productive if they were happier makes intuitive sense, and many studies demonstrate that it is so. Some just look at variation in employee mood and then use clever statistical methods to link it to work outcomes. One example, a 2023 study on telesales workers, showed that when they felt happier, for whatever reason, it led to more calls an hour and a higher conversion of calls into sales. Another research approach involves experiments in which workers are exposed to a mood-raising experience, and their productivity afterward is compared with what it had been beforehand. During one such study in 2015, economists showed people clips of funny movies and found that doing so boosted their performance of tasks by about 12 percent.

This essay accompanies the release of Brooks’s new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press), which is available today.

All of that is interesting so far as it goes, but such experiments are not very practical for managers—after all, screening a lot of funny movies would significantly disrupt the office day. What leaders really need are data that break down the specific factors associated with employee happiness, translate them into management actions, measure these factors in actual companies, and link everything to the firm’s performance. Only then could you devise a truly effective management strategy.

I know of one company that’s trying to tie all that together: the investment-research firm Irrational Capital, founded in 2017. Using both public and private data sources on employee satisfaction, its researchers found that over an 11-year period ending in 2025, S&P 500 companies that scored in the top 20 percent on several key employee-happiness measures outperformed (in stock price) those in the bottom 20 percent by, as of the first quarter of this year, nearly six percentage points. Meanwhile, the top 20 percent in such extrinsic rewards as pay and benefits beat the bottom 20 percent by only two percentage points. These findings fluctuate according to market conditions, but across the whole period of the study, employee-happiness measures have consistently outperformed extrinsic rewards when boosting a company’s stock price.

The happiness factors are not fixed characteristics of individual companies, because they move in and out of the top 20 percent depending on how satisfied employees are at any particular time. The researchers have precisely market-tested the effect of happiness factors on performance by fielding an electronically traded fund that buys and sells the companies’ stock according to their current happiness ranking. Over the past five years, the fund’s “trailing returns”—a performance metric that provides a historical snapshot of a given period—were about 10 percent higher than the S&P average.

Irrational Capital researchers found six specific factors behind employee satisfaction. In order of their positive impact on a firm’s performance, they are: innovation (managers’ openness to input and ideas); direct management (clarity and truthfulness of communication); organizational effectiveness (non-bureaucratic, efficient processes); engagement (leadership that supports learning and growth); emotional connection (a culture that fosters friendships among colleagues); and organizational alignment (a good match between the company’s external mission and its internal culture). For me, as a social scientist teaching business leaders, this suggests six corresponding goals for managers who want to raise employee satisfaction that translates into higher firm performance. Here they are, ordered by importance.

1. Listen for concerns and learn new ideas.
Nothing is more disempowering for an employee than a boss who doesn’t want to hear an idea that could help the company. Managers should look for ways to get as much feedback as possible, and then show they’ve really heard it and thought about how to use it.

2. Act and speak with clarity and truth.
Particularly in times of uncertainty, employees are highly attuned to doublespeak and obfuscation. Always be frank and explicit about what they need to know for their job. People can handle I don’t know what’s going to happen, as long as this is the truth, not an evasion.

3. Ruthlessly cut red tape and unnecessary meetings.
Employees hate bureaucracy. Some procedural stuff is necessary to maintain systems and accountability, but nothing lowers workers’ well-being faster than obliging them to waste productive time. This is especially true of meetings, which should be minimized whenever possible.

4. Look for ways to support learning and develop team members.
The employees you want to keep are the ones who love to learn new skills and grow in ability. Look for ways to create a culture of improvement through mentoring, training, and continuing education.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Think twice before taking the top job]

5. Promote a culture of friendship.
This goal is easy to misunderstand: It does not entail making friends with the boss; on the contrary, as scholars found in 2004, the interlocutor who, on average, induces day to day the most negative emotion for an employee is their boss. As a boss, accept the loneliness of your role—but do whatever you can to realize the fact that the happiest employees are friends with one another.

6. Live up to the organization’s external mission.
Many companies have high-minded ideals on paper and are dedicated in theory to making a better world. But, as they say, charity begins at home. If your mission is to uphold the dignity of all people, your employees should be first in line.

For more than a century, virtually every corporate-productivity fad has been based on the notion that employees can be managed as if they were machines. This highly instrumental, scientistic approach to human affairs was what the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky mocked in Notes From the Underground as the “palace of crystal.” What he meant by this was the delusion of technocrats’ solutions to people’s problems—“all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude”—that were bound to fail and leave people feeling helpless, angry, and alienated.

If Dostoyevsky were alive today, the most obvious target for his derision would no doubt be the utter domination of tech in our daily life, intermediating friendship, dating, and work relationships. Just as the great novelist predicted, the technocratic delusion promises greater connection but leaves people lonelier and more depressed every passing year. Of a piece with this palace of digital crystal are the management fads that waste money and reduce people to productivity numbers.

The way out of the palace of crystal is surprisingly simple, in life and at work: Just treat people as people.

Resist the Snark and Be Happy

2025-08-07T12:00:00-04:00

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness,” wrote Robert Heinlein in his 1982 futuristic novel, Friday. “A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” What, 40 years ago, were the science-fiction adventures of a technologically enhanced “artificial person” turned out also to be prophecy when we consider today’s digital networks of anonymous humans and bots, conversations between people and humanlike artificial intelligence, and a cratering of courtesy. This loss of gentle manners at almost every level is attributable, at least in part, to our adoption of these technologies.

Virtually everyone agrees that people are becoming ruder, especially online. But do you see this tendency in yourself as well? Even if you’re not a sociopathic troll who feeds on incivility and conflict, you might all the same have noticed that you’re less polite than you once were, and that online environments have contributed to this. You may have observed the passing of such small niceties as addressing others by name in your messages and signing off with your own name. Quite possibly, you find yourself adopting a harsher, more sarcastic tone on social media than you ever would in real life. And why bother saying “please” and “thank you” when communicating with what is, or might be, an AI bot?

This coarsening, even toward nonhuman entities, is not harmless. Indeed, it is probably hurting your well-being. When you become less polite, the alteration in your conduct can make you less happy, more depressed, and angrier about life. You may not be able to fix the broader trends in society, but you can—and should—fix this in yourself.

[Read: How please stopped being polite]

Politeness can be defined in four ways. The first two are: etiquette, which governs basic manners and speech, and conduct, which involves actions such as holding open a door for someone to pass. The other two are a pair: positive politeness, which refers to doing courteous things for others, and negative politeness, which involves refraining from discourtesy. Social scientists define these forms of politeness not just as a set of behaviors but as part of personality. Specifically, one of the Big Five Personality Traits—agreeableness—is made up of compassion and politeness. One well-regarded study from the 1990s estimated that the heritability of agreeableness is about 41 percent genetic, allowing us to infer that you inherit some politeness from your parents partly through your genes, but more through how you were brought up. This also implies that you can become more polite with good influences and by cultivating positive habits.

Some aspects of courtesy are fairly universal, such as saying please and thank you, as well as listening while others speak (positive politeness) without interrupting (negative politeness). Other courteous values vary around the world: Shaking hands is good manners in London but not in Bangkok; tipping a taxi driver is a common courtesy in New York but not in Tokyo. Some demographic variation in politeness also occurs, and gender norms can play a part too. For example, experiments show that American women generally receive more politeness than men do, and show less courteous behavior to men than vice versa.

None of us wants to be treated rudely, online or in person. The finding in studies that when someone is discourteous toward you they lower your well-being is so commonsense as to make citation scarcely necessary. Even witnessing rudeness toward others can lower your happiness, as experiments have shown: When media content contains sarcasm by the author and the comment sections are uncivil, readers become unhappier—even if they agree with the snarky writer or commenters. Rudeness just brings you down.

More surprising, perhaps, is the effect that your being courteous toward others has on your own mood. Researchers in 2021 showed that being polite to others raises happiness and lowers anger. This might be counterintuitive at first, because we may at times feel a powerful urge to be snippy—so doesn’t that mean that snapping at someone should make us feel better? The reverse is the case: Being impolite is more like scratching at your poison-ivy rash. Giving in to the urge makes things worse. I doubt you’ve ever felt great when you’ve known, deep down, that you’ve been a jerk, whereas you’ve almost certainly felt better when you’ve been your better angel. Being prosocial, even when you don’t feel like it or the object of your courtesy doesn’t deserve it, has been proven to raise your mood.

The effect is so powerful that you benefit from being polite even when your courtesy is extended toward nonhumans. Psychologists writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology set research participants a task to perform alongside a helping robot named Tako: Those who had a stronger urge to thank Tako for its help afterward were more likely than others to behave in a prosocial way in a subsequent task. This finding suggests that even being civil to an AI bot or other nonhuman interface matters; yelling at Siri or being curt with ChatGPT will lead you to behave worse with other people, and lower your well-being.

[Read: Three rules for politeness during a confusing social transition]

In short, be polite for your own sake. And be aware that if tech-mediated interactions are making you less polite, that can still hurt your happiness. Quitting the internet or returning to a world without AI is impractical, so the solution to this challenge of courtesy lies in how you consciously decide to behave. Here are three rules for your conduct that I can suggest.

1. Make courtesy a habit, even when other humans are not involved.
My late father had impeccable manners, and I have no doubt that if he were still alive, he would start every request to AI with please and finish it with thank you. Years ago, I would have made fun of that—Dad, the bot doesn’t care!—but I’m sure he wouldn’t have paid any attention, because I now understand that his good manners were a demonstration of decent behavior to himself, about himself. And they would have protected him from some of the unhappiness we see all around. So today, I try to imitate him, online and in person, whomever or whatever I’m interacting with.

2. Renounce snark, whether you’re witnessing it or using it yourself.
As noted, media sarcasm can lower your well-being as its consumer. Yet mockery of others seems an integral part of modern communication, especially among people who wish to seem sophisticated. I try not to participate in this, because even if, in the moment, it can feel satisfying or make me laugh, I know the cost to my soul. I no longer read comment sections in publications, and when an author throws out an impolite barb, I stop reading altogether.

3. Respond to rudeness not with rudeness, but with courtesy.
If your happiness correspondent got into social-media spats or angry public battles, that would be a bad look and very off-brand. So I always refrain. But I try to go further than self-restraint: If I need to react to a rude in-person remark or mean online comment, I try to see it as an opportunity to improve my well-being by responding with courtesy and dignity. This gets easier with practice, and I have never once been sorry for passing on the opportunity to retaliate with a nasty zinger. I’m only sorry when I fail to make use of the opportunity to do the right thing and feel good about it.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to get the most happiness from your social life]

One last thought about Heinlein’s “dying culture” claim: Is it true that our culture is dying, given all the rudeness? And if so, are we too far gone to turn it around? On many days, things do look bleak, as online nastiness seems to become the dominant style. But my personal defense mechanism also aims to act as a countercultural force: I see politeness as today’s punk rock because it so transgresses the spirit of our times. And like punk rock, when you empower yourself with politeness, you feel exhilarated. It is the ultimate exercise in freedom: the freedom to be the person I want to be in the face of a cultural tyranny.

Thank you for reading this column.

How to Know You’re Not a Phony

2025-07-31T12:00:00-04:00

“I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people,” wrote John Steinbeck in his private journal when he was working on The Grapes of Wrath, his 1939 epic novel about a family fleeing the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Depression to seek a better future in California. You might think he was simply experiencing momentary self-doubt but, informed by my work as an academic and writer, I see a hint of something more insidious, which plagues many people of great intellect and erudition: impostor syndrome. For many of these high achievers, the more plaudits they receive, the more they worry that they’re putting one over on everyone.

You don’t even have to be a genius to feel like an impostor. In today’s environment, when people are assiduously cultivating an image on social media that accentuates the positive and buries the negative, anyone can be made to feel they’re a failure and a phony. If you worry about this too, I have some good news for you: The fact that you have the worry means you probably aren’t a phony; the true phony is convinced they’re not one. Even so, suffering from impostor syndrome is certainly deleterious to your happiness. But you can do something about that.

[Read: ChatGTP has impostor syndrome]

The condition was first described in 1978 by two psychologists in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice as the common affliction in which people who possess real skills and knowledge secretly believe they’re inadequate or incompetent. The authors of the study found evidence that many high-achieving women felt insecurity about their abilities—“an internal experience of intellectual phoniness.” Later research found that this phenomenon applied not just to women or to any particular demographic group; “impostor phenomenon,” as they labeled it (syndrome was a later refinement), was something anyone could experience. (One exception is age—older people experience it less than younger adults.)

A number of tests have been validated for impostor syndrome. One is the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, which asks respondents whether they agree with such statements as “I’m afraid people important to me may find out that I’m not as capable as they think I am.” (You can get an idea of how you score on the scale by using a slimmed-down online survey.) By testing, researchers find that certain personalities tend to experience the syndrome more than others. People high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness are more afflicted than others. Perhaps not surprisingly, introverts are prone to feeling fake more than extroverts (who tend toward narcissism). Perfectionists typically feel like phonies, because they’re so focused on their own perceived errors.

Impostor syndrome tends to manifest among people who work in highly technical fields that require the trust of others. Multiple studies have found a high incidence among young physicians: For a 2021 survey, more than three-quarters of surgical residents reported a significant or severe feeling of being an impostor. I suspect this occurs because doctors think that they must demonstrate a great deal of confidence they don’t authentically feel—which is indeed a form of phoniness, albeit a functionally necessary one. You hardly want your surgeon saying, “Hmm, let’s see how this goes, then,” as you’re being wheeled into the operating room. And if you’re a parent, remember the way your kid looked at you when they were little—with complete trust. If they only knew, I used to think.

Some scholars have argued that impostor syndrome can theoretically lead to higher performance in tasks, insofar as it provides an emotional motivation to succeed. If you’re telling yourself that you’re merely a poser, you will be impelled to improve, the theory goes. But just as such denigration would be destructive when applied to a child, such an abusive method, when self-inflicted, can have huge psychic costs, possibly provoking depression and anxiety. Such negative feedback can also lead to cognitive distortion, causing its subjects to discount legitimate compliments and overgeneralize failure. This makes useful learning harder and is associated with impaired job satisfaction and burnout.

[Read: When you fear that your writing doesn’t measure up to your ambitions]

If you experience impostor syndrome, your well-being is almost certainly compromised. Fortunately, several straightforward ways to treat the condition are available.

1. Don’t talk to yourself like someone you hate.
Just as you wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, tell your spouse or your child that they’re an incompetent idiot, you should avoid speaking that way to yourself. Kinder self-talk might sound like the sort of indulgent self-focus that characterizes narcissism, which would indeed hazard phoniness, but in this necessary therapeutic context, it is simply recognizing reality: You are not an incompetent idiot; you are simply a person hoping to learn and improve.

2. Track your progress.
Whether you’re a surgeon or a parent (or both), when engaged in a challenging task, try framing your activity as an opportunity for growth and learning. Keep an account of your personal progress to create an objective record of your momentum toward your goals, as opposed to obsessing over what you haven’t yet achieved. So for example, if you’ve recently started a new job, think each day about the new skills and knowledge you’ve acquired, rather than worrying about what you still don’t know or can’t do. Keep a log of these accomplishments and review it regularly.

3. Get some company.
Building or joining a community of people similarly situated professionally can be very helpful. This provides a peer group with whom you can speak frankly about any insecurities and discover that such doubts are quite common. This turned out to be a benefit of the Lean In movement started by Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, because the circles of professional women it created were invited to share the experiences that held them back—and impostor syndrome was a very typical example. The business group YPO’s Forum program for young chief executives is based on a similar idea, which members find enormously helpful as a venue for unburdening themselves of feelings of isolation and insecurity.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The strength you gain by not taking offense]

We’ve looked in depth at people who feel like an impostor but aren’t. Despite the temporary misery he confided to his diary, Steinbeck clearly was no fraud: The Grapes of Wrath went on to win the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a major factor in his later being awarded the Nobel Prize. But we should consider a phenomenon closely related to the syndrome: people who disingenuously claim to be impostors, even though they don’t think they are, out of false modesty. I’m talking about the humblebraggarts who say such things as “I’m the last person to deserve the personal invitation I just got from the president to visit the White House!”

Nothing is phonier, of course, than this veneer of humility. The humblebrag’s ruse is transparent, and makes its perpetrator instantly irritating and unlikable—a bit like, well, a phony.

The Psychological Secret to Longevity

2025-07-24T12:00:00-04:00

When I was 9 years old, Thursday was my favorite day of the week, for one very special reason: I had my beloved weekly French-horn lesson. I remember thinking that Thursdays felt as though they came only about once a month. Some five decades later, Thursdays still have a special significance for me—as the day my Atlantic column comes out. But unlike the way I felt so many years ago, I now feel as though Thursdays occur about every three or four days. The weekly thing seems to come around much sooner than every week. What gives?

This phenomenon of time seeming to speed up with age—or, for that matter, slow down under the influence of boredom or frustration—attracts a good deal of wonderment. The jarring juxtaposition of clock and calendar time with the subjective experience of time’s passing can make life feel like a poorly dubbed movie. You may simply have assumed that your sense of time was unreliable, but the truth is more complicated—and interesting. An entire science and philosophy of perception explains this warping of time. Whether time speeds by or crawls along, a grasp of this concept can help you make the most of your life.

[Read: Being powerful distorts people’s perception of time]

We tend to think of time as a dimension of physics, but philosophers have much to say about its mysteries. A principal target of their skeptical scrutiny is whether time manifests objective linearity. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, for example, introduced the idea of time as a truly subjective unit of experience. A minute is not 60 ticks of a hand on the clock but rather a quantum of your individual existence. The size of that quantum depends on what you are doing: It is very small when you are sleeping; it is very large when you are waiting in line at Starbucks. We need artificial, objective measures of time—clocks and calendars—to manage many aspects of a functioning society, but clock time is no more “real” than the map on your phone is the actual road you are driving on.

Bergson’s 19th-century compatriot Paul Janet argued that the size of a unit of time is primarily a function of age, because a person’s perception of time depends on how much time they have themselves experienced. In other words, time truly does speed up as you get older. In 2017, a group of psychologists working from estimates that people gave of how they perceived the passage of time at different ages showed that most of us do experience this sense of acceleration. Many researchers believe that time perception shifts in a logarithmic way, and some social scientists have found evidence supporting this idea: In one 2009 experiment, study participants reported that the next three months seemed to them in that moment like three months, whereas when they were asked to contemplate a period of 36 months in the future, that felt like less than six months in today’s terms.

I have created my own equation that provides similar modeling of “experienced life” (EL) at different ages. You need to specify your current age (a) and your expected age at death (n). Then the subjective years of life you have left is 1 minus EL multiplied by n.

The numbers it generates are a bit discouraging, I’ll admit. According to actuarial tables, given the good health I still enjoy at 61, I have even odds of making it to 95. That seems overly optimistic, given my family history, but I would certainly take an extra 34 years on the planet. Unfortunately, according to my formula inspired by our French philosopher friends, most of those 35 years are “fake” because I have already experienced 91 percent of my life, which implies that I have only about eight subjective years left. If I live not to 95 but to 80, I have just five and a half years to go. No more waiting in the Starbucks line for me! (Or so you might think; more on this below.)

Age is not the only reason that experienced time might be compressed. Another is your circadian rhythms. In 1972, a French explorer named Michel Siffre spent six months in an underground cave in Texas, living with a complete absence of natural light, clock, and calendar. Gradually, his “days”—periods of being awake and asleep—began to stretch, sometimes to as long as 48 hours. When he emerged, he believed that he had been in the cave for only two or three months. If you struggle to get to sleep at night, your time perception might be a less extreme version of Siffre’s. Researchers have found that some people have a natural circadian rhythm of more than 24 hours, meaning that days feel a bit too short and that these people are chronically not sleepy at night. If you lived in a cave, your life would have fewer days than those measured out in standard 24-hour chunks.

Perception of time accelerates not just with age and circadian rhythms; it can also speed up—or slow down—depending on what you are experiencing at any given moment. This phenomenon is called tachypsychia. Neuroscientists have shown through experiments with mice that when levels of dopamine are elevated because of excitement and engagement, time passes more quickly in the brain; when dopamine is depressed because of boredom or anxiety, time goes by more slowly. In other words, time really does fly when you’re having fun.

An extreme form of tachypsychia involves time seeming to freeze—when a few moments seem like minutes or hours, and you remember them clearly for years afterward. This can be a positive experience, such as a 10-second roller-coaster ride, or negative, such as a car accident that your brain processes in ultra-slow motion. One hypothesis for this tachypsychic phenomenon is that during these extremely intense moments, you lay down memories very densely in the brain, which makes a moment’s experience seem to endure an unusually long time.

[Read: Why a healthy person’s perception of time is inaccurate]

All of the philosophy and research of experienced time yields this bitter irony: The more you enjoy yourself, especially in the second half of life, the faster time passes. So how can you alter this effect and live, subjectively speaking, longer? One answer is to spend more time tapping your foot impatiently in the Starbucks line, especially the older you get. Also, be sure to get into a lot of car accidents. (“Officer, I ran all those red lights because I am trying to live longer. I read it in The Atlantic.”)

If the boredom or trauma strategies don’t suit you—and I don’t recommend them—here are some better ways to get greater value from your scarce time.

1. Meaning is greater than fun.
An important principle of time maximization is memory, as the accident example suggests: The denser your memories from an experience, the longer it seems to go on in the moment and the better you recall it later, in all its rich, imprinted detail. You don’t have to leave this to chance—and especially not to an accident. Research suggests that your memory is enhanced by significant, emotionally evocative activities, which implies that a truly long life favors the pursuit of deep meaning over simple fun. I find this true when I recall a spiritual experience such as walking the Camino de Santiago with my wife in a way I can savor—whereas a beach vacation that lasted the same number of days on the calendar went by very pleasantly, but without leaving much trace of its significance. I think of one as lasting, in every sense; the other, as fleeting.

2. Savor the moments.
Part of seeking meaning is to be strategic in your choice of activities and partners. But another part of the task requires you to be purposeful and present in your life. I have written before about the art of savoring life, which psychologists define as the “capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences.” This means paying full attention to whatever you are doing now, instead of thinking about whatever might come next. To expand my perception of time while savoring, I try to include not just the positive experiences but also negative ones—rather than trying to eliminate them as quickly as possible. Although that practice can be hard at first, it ends up making me feel more fully alive.

3. Avoid routine.
I have moved my home a lot in my adult life—about 20 times in the past 40 years. (No, I am not in a witness-protection program.) I also travel almost every week. One reason for this is that I’m allergic to routine. Some people like a predictable commute to work and seeing the same people and things every day, but I am not one of them. This restless bias of mine does create some transaction costs, but the constant novelty has the benefit of giving me denser memories and thus the sensation of a longer life. Researchers have run experiments that show that when people pursue familiar activities, time goes by more quickly, whereas unfamiliar experiences slow time down. Routines put you on autopilot, and that makes savoring difficult and its rewards elusive. You might not want to go so far as to change your house, which is certainly stressful, but you can do a lot to change up your environment, your daily habits, and the people you see.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be your best despite the passing years]

One more point in closing: The most important principle in managing your time well is not how much of it you have, or how long you can extend it, but how you use each moment of it. We tend to act as though our lives will go on forever, so we waste time on trivial activities (scrolling) or participate in unproductive ones (meetings). This is not a new problem. The Stoic philosophers of antiquity recognized it well, which is why they used the adage memento mori (“remember you will die”) to guide their meditations. By focusing on nonbeing, they argued, you will appreciate being more fully. That consciousness, whether your life goes by quickly or slowly, will help you use your time well.

On that note, I am pondering the fact that one Thursday will be my last column. But this is not it, which makes me happy.

How to Be More Charismatic, but Not Too Much More

2025-07-17T12:00:00-04:00

A special quality sets some people apart from the crowd. They are magnetic to be around, attractive to watch, hypnotic to listen to. They have, in a word, charisma. It seems like a divine grace—indeed, the word derives from the ancient Greek χάρισμα, meaning “God’s gift.” The word appeared in third-century B.C.E. Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, and early Christians referred to charismata as blessings bestowed on believers such as prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues.

Our modern usage of charisma comes from the early-20th-century sociologist Max Weber, who called it a “certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” And today, the concept of charisma is having a moment in the abbreviated slang term rizz, which, in Generation Z vernacular, describes one’s ability to charismatically court a romantic partner. It involves a notable power to impress others with smooth talk, confidence, or style—a skill we’d probably all like to have, beyond the domain of romance.

Do you have charisma? Would your life be better if you had more? Or is it, like fame, a blessing that hides a curse? The idea of being more charismatic certainly seems appealing, but here’s what science can tell you about whether this elusive rizz is a divine gift or a false friend.

[From the September 2016 issue: The charisma effect]

A number of psychologists have looked for charisma’s seemingly magic ingredients. One of the most cited studies on the topic, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2018, argues that charisma is actually a combination of two traits: influence (the ability to guide others with confidence and competence) and affability (the ability to make other people feel comfortable and at ease). Influence is judged based on qualities such as one’s presence in a room, magnetism, and leadership ability. People see affability in, among other traits, frequency of smiling, approachability, and projection of positive energy.

Leaders use their charisma to influence others in very specific ways. By analyzing speeches given by charismatic individuals, one helpful model shows a distinct, three-stage use of emotion. First, the speakers model and amplify the mood prevailing among their audience (“We are angry because those people over there are bad!”). Then they introduce a dissonant emotion that actually confuses people (“But you know what? I don’t really care about that.”). Finally, they use that confusion to reframe the emotional environment and win over the audience to their view (“Because we should be happy that we are better people than they are!”).

You will not be surprised to learn that charisma and professional success are strongly associated. Researchers following people’s careers find that charisma early in life predicts a higher income 15 years later, as well as the managerial level a person achieves and the number of subordinates they have. However, this relationship appears to be curvilinear. Scholars in 2018 showed that people with a more charismatic personality are judged to be a more effective leader, but only up to about the 60th percentile. Beyond that point, perceived leadership effectiveness associated with charisma starts to decline. The authors of that study believed this was because extremely charismatic leaders tend to be strong on imparting a vision but weak on implementing it.

Another possible reason why a very high level of charisma may lower the perceived effectiveness of a leader is the possible connection with narcissism. High charisma is specifically associated with people whom psychologists label “agentic narcissists”; these people are extremely self-assured (whereas “antagonistic narcissists” are mean and aggressive, and not perceived as charismatic at all). You can probably think of individuals whose charismatic qualities make them an effective leader up to a point, but tip over into being off-putting and arousing suspicion.

[Tom F. Wright: The origin of vibes]

In short, charisma might be a trait you’d want to increase—within reasonable limits. Of course, if charismatic individuals are simply born with the gift, this is a moot point. Some charisma, no doubt, is innate. We know, say, that attractive people are perceived as more charismatic than unattractive people; the same is true of more intelligent people. Charisma is also strongly correlated with personality traits, which are 40 to 60 percent heritable. Here, extroverts have the advantage because they tend to be high in influence and affability, while introverts score low on both.

Yet ample evidence exists that charisma can be cultivated. Last year, three Israeli researchers created a virtual-reality device called the “Charismulator” to help people develop a more appealing communication style, both verbal and nonverbal. Subjects who trained for only a few minutes with the device were judged by others to have 17 percent more “general charisma” than they’d had before the intervention.

The nonverbal-communication training exposed the participants to emphatic body gestures that conveyed a message, warm facial expressions, and powerful voice inflections—all demonstrated by charismatic speakers. You can re-create this input easily by reading the words of famous orators (think Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.), and studying videos of great speakers on YouTube. I stumbled on my own version of this method of the Charismulator intervention early in my public-speaking career, by listening to audio recordings of great communicators. I took copious notes on the speakers I admired, and accepted every invitation to talk in order to practice what I was learning. (Your nephew’s bar mitzvah in February in Fairbanks, Alaska? I’ll be there!)

Anyone can improve their charismatic presence by being conscious of using these physical gestures, but it takes practice to make learned charisma stick. The early feedback I got on my public speaking did not include the phrase incredible charisma. The first notes were more like “paces like a caged animal” and “terrifying amount of eye contact.” With time, I did get better at it—fortunately.

[Read: The perils of charisma]

One question I haven’t answered yet—and given this column’s remit, you might be thinking that was a strange oversight: Does possessing charisma make you happier? I have found no evidence that addresses this topic head-on. Although you might assume that charisma would deliver happiness, one line of research gives me pause. One human capacity that strongly predicts charisma but is most definitely not correlated with higher happiness is self-consciousness—that is, thinking frequently about yourself. Charismatic people do think about themselves a lot—and that characteristic, as I have previously discussed, usually brings unhappiness.

When it comes to happiness, much can be said for accepting who you are, rather than constantly worrying about what impression you’re making on others. So yes: You probably can get more rizz, but you might want to skip it and have more peace of mind instead.

How to Keep on the Sunny Side of Life

2025-07-10T12:00:00-04:00

On the Sun Coming Out in the Afternoon.

Methinks all things have traveled since you shined,
But only Time and clouds, Time’s team, have moved;
Again foul weather shall not change my mind,
But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.

So wrote Henry David Thoreau in a journal entry for April 1, 1841, that was later published in The Atlantic. This springtime musing about the passage of time and life’s burdens was a reminder to him that what was truly good and right in his world had not changed but was only temporarily obscured, just as the clouds might block the cheerful sun for an hour or two each day.

I enjoy such poetical contemplation as much as anyone. But in the same magazine these many decades later, I want to understand more literally, in my prosaic social scientist’s way, how sunshine affects well-being. With some research data in mind, you can make the summer sun that rises tomorrow your ally in the search for greater happiness.

[Arthur C. Brooks: To get out of your head, get out of your house]

In 1971, the singer-songwriter John Denver famously claimed that sunshine on his shoulders made him happy. (As a No. 1 hit single, the song that made the claim probably also made him pretty rich.) Researchers have put this idea to the test many times since, and found that it is basically true. For example, one 2021 study found that exposure to sunlight had a moderately positive effect on the well-being of participants subjected to coronavirus lockdowns.

That finding is an average outcome; your experience may vary. For some people, the effects are very significant, in both directions. This includes those who really struggle when deprived of sunshine: Seasonal affective disorder, a depressive state that occurs during gloomy winter months, occurs in up to 9 percent of the population, depending on latitude. Conversely, other people suffer from bright sunshine: One 2016 study showed that although indirect sunlight appears to be uniformly positive for well-being (improving a depressed mood), direct sunshine can raise anxiety for some individuals, the scholars hypothesized, because it stimulates certain neurobiological effects such as alertness, which can disrupt sleep and worsen anxiety.

The prevalence of SAD in northern climes may contribute to the common belief that differences in the need for sunlight may be due to where you were raised. I have seen no studies that would affirm this intuition, but I have plenty of anecdotal testimony from my own family. A native of rainy Seattle, I can take or leave sunshine, whereas my Barcelona-born wife absolutely must get into the sun regularly or bad things happen (to me).

Scientists have several theories about why sunshine generally boosts mood. First, sunlight interacts with the eyes’ intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, which directly affects brain regions that regulate mood, and indirectly regulates circadian rhythms, enhancing both wakefulness and sleep. In addition, many scholars believe that the vitamin D produced by sunlight exposure has antidepressant and anxiety-reducing effects. This mechanism has not been proved, but candidates for why it might occur include higher antioxidant activity and improved levels of monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine.

So what is the right amount of sunlight exposure? For simple vitamin-D synthesis, estimates range from nine to 15 minutes a day, depending on season, location, and skin type. Much more than this, and the effect probably does not increase. Many people get a lot more sun than this, of course, and some people like to lie outside for hours at a time. Regardless of what happiness benefit sunbathers may be getting, their dermatologists will shake their heads, noting the abundant evidence that too much sun exposure leads to skin damage, aging, and various cancers.

Scholars have looked into why sun worshippers would risk their health in this way, and a group found that 58 percent of this behavior might be genetic, and is associated with higher consumption of cannabis and alcohol. One way to interpret this is that excessive sunbathing is another kind of risky behavior that yields instant gratification, like using drugs; another interpretation is that the sun exposure may be soothing to people with substance-use and mood disorders. You can decide yourself whether sunbathing is better or worse than other self-medication methods.

[Read: When summer is depressing]

From the quarter of an hour you need for your vitamin D to the all-day session on the sun lounger frying yourself to a crisp, you will probably find your own happy medium for mood enhancement. And all told, the evidence for a prudent amount of sun exposure backs Denver’s notion that it boosts happiness. You might keep three practical things in mind as you get your solar well-being treatment.

1. Make sunshine a daily routine.
Treat your sun exposure like taking your vitamins, something you take care of by doing in a regular way at the same time every day. The Stanford University neuroscientist Andrew Huberman recommends incorporating five to 10 minutes of direct sun exposure into a morning routine, before the sun’s rays are likely to burn your skin. If that day is cloudy, the exposure is still beneficial but you can compensate by increasing the time outside a bit. If you find that you’re one of those people for whom direct sunlight raises anxiety, look for ways to get more indirect light exposure instead, such as sitting near a window.

2. Avoid light at night.
Unless you are living extremely far north, sunshine near bedtime isn’t much of a problem. But even artificial light too late into the night can have a negative effect on your well-being by suppressing your brain’s melatonin levels, which should be rising as you prepare for bed. That will interrupt your sleep. Clinicians recommend that you dim your home’s lights about two hours before bed and avoid turning on lights during the night if you can. And under no circumstances should you look at your phone in bed.

3. Get your morning light even when it’s not sunny.
In one experiment on Finnish subjects in winter, the participants experienced higher vitality and lower depressive symptoms if they spent at least an hour a day, at least five days a week, under six 15-watt cool-white fluorescent bulbs while working. Similarly, researchers have found that near-infrared-light exposure in the morning can raise well-being. So be prepared to use artificial-light sources when the sun don’t shine.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Stop spending time on things you hate]

One last point: Sunlight is good for happiness, but it is only one of many means to improve your well-being and not even the most significant one. Unless you experience particularly grave SAD, you don’t need to make sun-seeking a quest for which you sacrifice other, more meaningful parts of life—such as close relationships, which are arguably the most important factor in determining happiness.

A study undertaken in 1998 by David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman for the journal Psychological Science famously asked midwesterners and Californians about their native climate and the other group’s climate. Both rated California’s as superior because of the sunshine, and both believed this gave the Californians a happiness edge. And yet the study found no differences in the groups’ self-reported life satisfaction, suggesting that even if the sunnier climate did boost Californians’ well-being, the midwesterners had other natural advantages that equalized their happiness—among those advantages, doubtless, were the close relationships they maintained back in Iowa or Ohio.

In fact, Thoreau himself made this very point. We think of him as a bit of a loner when he communed with nature at Walden Pond (where he probably wrote the lines that opened this column): a person who needed nothing but the company of his own thoughts and a bit of sunshine. But two days later, in fact, he wrote in his journal about what he valued most: “Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody.”