Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier

by Arthur C. Brooks

The particular details you retrieve about past events generally correspond with your current emotional state. For example, researchers have observed that when you are feeling afraid, you tend to construct memories that focus on the sources of threats and remember the past as more full of specific things that hurt you than you otherwise would.[22]

The fact that your current conditions and feelings influence how you reconstruct memories gives you a lot of power to change your understanding of the past.

The next time you want to make a positive change in your life, don’t limit your imagination to a change of scenery or the people around you. Start with the backdrop of your life, the very thing that is probably making you restless in the first place.

Metacognition requires practice, especially if you haven’t ever thought about it before. There are four practical ways to get started. First, when you experience intense emotion, simply observe your feelings.

they were happening to someone else.[23] In this way, one can understand them consciously and let them pass away naturally instead of allowing them to turn into something destructive.

Second, as we touched on briefly before, journal your emotions. You may have noticed that when you are upset, if you write about what you are feeling, you immediately feel better. Journaling is in fact one of the best ways to achieve metacognition, because it forces you to translate inchoate feelings into specific thoughts, an action that requires your prefrontal cortex.[24]

For example, if you are feeling frantic about all the things you need to do, without metacognition there is no way to organize the problem in your mind.

As another example, say you are in a relationship that is souring against your wishes. Don’t use a confrontational (limbic) reaction right off the bat. Instead, take a few days to record what is happening as accurately as possible, as well as your reaction to it.

Third, keep a database of positive memories, not just negative ones.

When you are in a highly limbic state, your mind can be saying everything is terrible and always will be, even though that is surely wrong. However, if you purposely conjure up happier memories, you can interrupt this doom loop.

Fourth, look for meaning and learning in the hard parts of life. Every life contains authentic bad memories. We’re not suggesting that you try to reconstruct a past that expunges them or makes them rosy.

Try methodically to see how such painful memories help you learn and grow. Scholars have shown that when people reflect on difficult

In your journal, reserve a section for painful experiences, writing them down right afterward.

For example, say you are passed over for a promotion at work. You are understandably disappointed and hurt, and you want to either vent about it to friends or put it out of your mind. Before you do either of those things, write down “Passed over for promotion” in your journal, with the date. In a month, go back to it, and record something constructive that you learned, such as “I mostly got over the disappointment after only about five days.”

now, choose the emotions you want

In truth, caffeine doesn’t pep you up—it simply prevents you from feeling drowsy. With enough caffeine, there’s almost no adenosine plugged in at all, so you lose all fatigue and feel jittery. Most people use caffeine because they aren’t content with the way they feel naturally, and want better outcomes in mood and work. It does so through substitution of one molecule for another. Caffeine is a good metaphor for the next principle of emotional self-management: You often don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. Rather, you can substitute a better one that you want.

Now remember, getting rid of negative emotions is neither possible nor desirable.

But sometimes you want to substitute caffeine for some of your adenosine, and sometimes you want to replace some of your negative emotions in the same way—by temporarily occupying your emotional receptors with something that also fits and is more constructive, leading you to act the way you want, not the way you feel.

You did this because Mother Nature gave you a little gift called negativity bias: a tendency to focus on negative information far more than positive information.[3]

Further, people are terrible at discriminating between negative information that matters and that which doesn’t.

The single best way to grasp the reality of good things in life and turn down the noise that makes real threats hard to distinguish from petty ones is to occupy some of the negative emotion receptors with a different, positive feeling. The most effective of these positive feelings is gratitude.

Gratitude isn’t a feeling that materializes in response to your circumstances. It is a life practice. And even if you feel that you have little to be grateful for right now, you can—and should—engage in it.

Scientists have investigated why gratitude raises positive emotion so reliably, and found several explanations. It stimulates the medial prefrontal cortex, part of the brain’s reward circuit.[5]

A 2012 study of nearly three thousand people found that when people agreed with the statements “I have so much in life to be thankful for” and “I am grateful for a wide variety of people,” they experienced positive emotions and fewer symptoms of depression.[10]

One caution: Don’t pretend you feel grateful for the things you aren’t actually grateful for.

Gratitude is a good general technique, but you can apply it in moments of acute negativity as well for immediate relief, especially when facing a situation you are dreading.

One way to make gratitude even more effective is prayer or meditation. Some researchers have noticed that increasing the practice of prayer is strongly associated with gratitude, even among people who aren’t devoutly religious.[12] If you don’t want to try prayer, a similar contemplative exercise can help, such as a quiet walk in which you repeat the phrase “I am blessed and will bless others.” Another technique for increasing gratitude: contemplate your death. No, really. Researchers found in 2011 that when people vividly imagined their demise, their sense of gratitude increased by 11 percent on average.[13]

Here’s an exercise for increasing gratitude in your life. 1. On Sunday night, take thirty minutes and write down the five things in your life for which you are authentically grateful. It’s all right if they seem trivial or silly. Almost everyone else has ridiculous things on their gratitude lists, too. Make sure one or two, though, involve people you love. 2. Each evening during the week, take out your list and study it for five minutes, one minute for each item. Do it also in the morning if you have time. 3. Update your list each Sunday by adding one or two items. At the end of five weeks, write down the changes you have seen in your attitude and levels of negative affect.

After that analysis, the medicine isn’t working anymore and you’re not laughing. “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” according to the writer E. B. White, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”[15]

Consuming humor—enjoying jokes—brings joy and relieves suffering. Your

Being funny, however, is the one dimension of a sense of humor that does not appear to boost happiness, which is sometimes called the “sad-clown paradox.”

They found no significant relationship between being funny (as judged by outside reviewers) and getting happier. Another study found that professional comedians score above population norms on scales measuring anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure).[18]

today. First, reject grimness. It can feel as if the world presents us with overwhelming challenges.

Researchers have found that a particularly humorless ideology is fundamentalism in one’s beliefs: “I am right and you are evil.”[20] Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the current ideological climate in the United States (and many other countries) is also so humorless, or that political extremists are so ready to use their offense at humor as a weapon. To be happier and make others happier, no matter what your politics, don’t participate in the war on jokes.

Second, don’t worry about being funny. Some people can’t tell jokes to save their lives.

That’s fine; for happiness, it’s better to consume humor than to supply it. It’s also a lot easier. Funny people tend to have particular innate neurological characteristics, and unusually high intelligence.[21]

Third, stay positive. The type of humor you consume and share matters. Humor, when it doesn’t belittle others, or when it makes you laugh at your circumstances, is associated with self-esteem, optimism, and life satisfaction, and with decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress.[22]

One of the worst emotional maladies that can befall any of us is pessimism.

In the thirteenth canto of “Purgatorio” in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the fourteenth-century Italian poet describes the ultimate punishment of people who had fallen prey to envy during their lives. He shows them perched precariously on the edge of a cliff. Because envy started with what they saw, their eyes are wired shut. To avoid falling, they must support themselves upon one another, something they never did in life.[25] This is a pretty grim punishment.

We all know how envy feels—how it sours our love and dries up our soul. How it makes us think not just about ourselves, but specifically about what we don’t have that others do.

“Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”[26] Envy, in short, is a happiness killer.

You are unlikely to die alone because your social media posts are less popular than those of others. But the pain can still be just as acute.

How people act in the face of this pain has led some scholars to distinguish between benign envy and malicious envy.[27] The former is miserable, but is met with a desire for self-improvement and to emulate the envied person. In contrast, malicious envy leads to wholly destructive actions, such as hostile thoughts and behavior intended to harm the other person.

Envy—especially when malicious—is terrible for you. To begin with, the pain is real. Neuroscientists find that envying other people stimulates your brain’s dACC, which, as we already know, is where you process pain.[29]

And in experiments, scholars have shown that, indeed, passive Facebook use (although no doubt this is not limited to Facebook) measurably decreases well-being through increased envy.[33]

First, focus on the ordinary parts of others’ lives. The main way we water that terrible weed is with our attention. We focus intently on the qualities we want but lack.

Second, turn off the envy machine. Social media increases envy because it does three things:

The solution is not to ditch social media; it is to unfollow people you don’t know and whose posts you simply look at because they have what you want.

Third, reveal your unenviable self. This is similar to rebelling against your shame by living outward instead of inward. While you are working to curtail your envy of others, stop trying to be envied yourself.

Obscuring the truth to yourself and others is a path to anxiety and unhappiness.