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

by Arthur C. Brooks

That’s because happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. We won’t find complete happiness on this side of heaven, but no matter where each of us is in life, we can all be happier. And then happier, and then happier still.

Here is a fact: You can get happier, even if you have problems. You can even get happier in some cases because you have problems.

He believed happiness comes from finding life’s purpose, accepting one’s fate, and behaving morally regardless of the personal cost—and

The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

The third macronutrient is the most important: purpose. We can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even without a lot of satisfaction. Without purpose, however, we are utterly lost, because we can’t deal with life’s inevitable puzzles and dilemmas. When we do have a sense of meaning and purpose, we can face life with hope and inner peace.

The common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.

Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. To get happier is to get more of these elements, in a balanced way—not all of one and none of another.

But if you were reading closely, you noticed one funny thing about all three: they all have some unhappiness within them. Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures; satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last; purpose almost always entails suffering. Getting happier, in other words, requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well, and understanding it isn’t an obstacle to our happiness.

You will need to work on that so you can give people the truth, see things accurately in life, and not say everything is going to be all right when it just isn’t true.

appreciating bad feelings

Extinguishing your regrets doesn’t put you on a path to freedom; it consigns you to making the same mistakes over and over again.

True freedom requires that we put regret in its proper place in our lives and learn from it without letting it weigh us down.

“If we reckon with our regrets properly, they can sharpen our decisions and improve our performance.”[23]

The secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness (so you can learn and grow) and manage the feelings that result.

happiness is not the goal, and unhappiness is not the enemy.

“Your emotions are signals to your conscious brain that something is going on that requires your attention and action—that’s all they are. Your conscious brain, if you choose to use it, gets to decide how you will respond to them.” Once more for good measure: Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.

You can deal with them. You feel the feel, then take the wheel. You get to decide how you’ll respond.

feel the feel, then take the wheel. And happierness.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

In other words, you can’t choose your feelings, but you can choose your reaction to your feelings.

“When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an [sic] hundred.”[10]

when you can’t change the world, change how you experience it instead

Everyone—even the most privileged among us—has life conditions they would like to change.

Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space to think and make decisions.

In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.

For example, let’s imagine you have a job that is really bringing you down. Let’s say you are bored and stressed, and your boss isn’t competent. You come home every day tired and frustrated, and you wind up drinking too much and watching a lot of dumb television to distract your mind. Tomorrow, try a new tactic. During the day, take a few minutes every hour or so, and ask, “How am I feeling?” Jot it down. Then after work, journal your experiences and feelings over the course of the day. Also write down how you responded to these feelings, and which responses were more and less constructive. Do this for two weeks, and you will find you are feeling more in control and acting in more productive ways. You will also be able to start seeing how you can manage your outside environment better, perhaps making a timeline to update your résumé and asking a few people for job market advice, and then you might actually start looking for something new. (We’ll offer a few more lessons like this at the end of the chapter.)

Boethius could not change his unfair circumstances. However, he could and did change his attitude toward them.

if you don’t like your past, rewrite it

You can’t escape your past, because it travels with you into the future, inside your head.

when you experience intense emotion, simply observe your feelings.

Try this yourself when, for example, you have a strong disagreement with your partner or a friend and are feeling angry. Sit quietly and think about the feelings you are experiencing. Imagine them moving physically from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex. There, observe the anger as if it were happening to someone else. Then say to yourself, “I am not this anger. It will not manage me or make my decisions for me.” This will leave you calmer and more empowered.

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]

Write down different ways you might react constructively, based on different possible responses from the other person. You will find that you are calmer and better able to cope with the situation, even if it feels unfixable.

In your journal, reserve a section for painful experiences, writing them down right afterward. Leave two lines below each entry. After one month, return to the journal and write in the first blank line what you learned from that bad experience in the intervening period. After six months, fill in the second line with the positives that ultimately came from it. You will be amazed at how this exercise changes your perspective on your past.

When it comes to our emotions, most of us have more power than we think. We don’t have to be managed by our feelings. We don’t have to hope that tomorrow will be a happy day so we can enjoy our lives, or dread our negative feelings because they will make our happiness impossible. How our emotions affect us, and our reaction to them, can be our decision.

This is not to say we can or should feel happy when someone we love dies, of course, which would be inappropriate. Rather, there are many times when there are two emotional options that match the circumstances we face, and one is better than the other for our happiness

Adenosine’s job is to make you feel tired when it plugs into its receptors. At the end of a long day, you produce a lot of adenosine so you know bedtime is coming and it’s time to relax. If you didn’t sleep well enough (or maybe even if you did), you’ll still have some in there in the morning, making you feel groggy.

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.

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.

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.

Life has sadness, tragedy, and frustration in abundance. Find the funny parts of it and everyone will be a lot better off.

And in fact, philosophers say that you are, in a very real way, two different people—one who sees, and one who is seen.

stop judging things around you so much. Judging might seem like pure observation, but it really isn’t. It is turning an observation of the outside world inward and making it about you. For example, if you say, “This weather is awful,” this is more about your feelings than it is about the weather. Further, you have just assigned a negative mood to something outside your control.

Do you really need to decide that the song you just heard is stupid? Try instead to observe more around you without regard to your opinions. Start by making more purely observational statements rather than values-based ones. Reframe “This coffee is terrible” as “This coffee has a bitter flavor.”

spend more time marveling at the world around you.

Some of the most profound and intimate experiences in life come when you can observe your journey without expectation of some destination or external payoff.

“I do not know what this day will bring, but I will accept it.”

As the Roman Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius observed almost two thousand years ago, “We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own,”

don’t water the envy weed

When we envy, we obsess over what we have or don’t have.